Smart road to meet deadline, be ready in a week

BENGALURU: Citizens can breathe a sigh of relief as one of the Smart City initiatives from Planetarium Road to Minsk Square will be completed within a week’s time, that is, November 1, as per its scheduled deadline. The road, green buffer zone, pedestrian walk as well as the cycle lane will be completed for citizens to use.

This comes despite the department having to overcome several hurdles,  including the heavy rains in the past one week as well as illegal pipelines and cables which were not observed in the original plan. The work on the 0.92 km stretch had started in January and was stalled due to the pandemic lockdown.

“If the plan showed existing two pipelines underground, after digging we would find an extra one. We had to remove all of them and put new ones. We have been constantly inspecting the work every day to ensure despite a deadline, that the work is done properly,” Hephsiba Rani Korlapati, Managing Director (MD) at Bengaluru Smart City Ltd told The New Sunday Express.

Bengaluru Smart City Limited, under the Smart Cities Mission, has taken up 13 projects (with 36 specific roads) for revitalisation of the central areas of the city and is currently constructing the roads in the CBD area. These roads have been taken up as part of the Original Action Plan proposed by the BBMP in 2017.

The total length of these road works is 30 km and the ‘smart’ roads are being built on the lines of TenderSURE roads of BBMP. The major stakeholders are BBMP, Bengaluru Traffic Police, Bescom, BWSSB, BSNL, BMTC as well as 20 college interns who have been bringing in their ideas and work into the project.

A team from the Directorate of Urban Land Transport and a few consultants from World Resources Institute (WRI) have been on-site to handhold and guide concerning drawings and design issues. As part of post-pandemic sustainable mobility designs, cycling tracks, seamless connectivity in the cycling district, several place-making themes have been included as part of the road works.