Mirage? June 1 is deadline No. 5 for RTR flyover

NEW DELHI: There’s some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that the Rao Tula Ram Marg flyover project will miss yet another deadline. The good news, if Public Works Department sources are to be believed, is that it will certainly be thrown open to the public on June 1.

Having missed four deadlines, it will take a lot for PWD to ensure the inauguration on June 1. Work, however, is going on in earnest — and there is only a claimed 15% of it remaining. Of the 77 spans, just 12 are left to be cast, officials revealed, though one of them added that none of these spans is less than 30 metres in length.


The agency has blamed delays in getting various permissions for the struggle to complete the three-lane elevated road meant to ease the traffic going from south Delhi to Indira Gandhi International Airport. It seeks to remedy the earlier folly of the construction of a one-way flyover that eventually had to be divided into two single-lane carriageways to handle the to-and-fro traffic at that point. It naturally has turned into a choke point that leaves over two lakh commuters harassed every day.

The construction of the new flyover began in November 2014 with a timeline that scheduled the completion for 2016-end. Now, with a delay of over 25 months, senior PWD officials might not reassure road users with their new optimism about opening the RTR Flyover to the public in three months’ time. In fact, when TOI travelled on the route on Tuesday, there was a prolonged vehicular bunch-up at the point, extending to some kilometres of the construction site.

An official privy to the construction plans said that though there were no new technologies used in the erection of the flyover, unique problems cropped up, including the need to fell 500 trees, the largest number for a project of this sort. The delays were so exasperating that PWD fined the building firm, Hindustan Construction Company, Rs 27.8 crore as penalty.

Besides the flyover, PWD is also constructing an underpass on the approach from Benito Juarez Marg to San Martin Marg and Ring Road as a part of the traffic decongesting project. While the last remaining obstacle in the way of the underpass — a dispute with Indian Railways over the clearing of high voltage power lines — has been sorted out, traffic police has halted the excavation of the tunnel under Ring Road until the construction of the flyover is over. Till date, around 35% of this work has been finished, PWD officials claimed.