Why this office hub is bound to take your breath away

Gurgaon: A drive through this road and all one can see is a huge cloud of dust making visibility difficult and breathing even harder. The Moulsari Avenue road, which connects Ambience Mall to the Moulsari Avenue metro station, is broken, riddled with potholes and choked with traffic during peak hours. It connects the national highway to Nathupur village and The National Media Centre, a residential colony, as well as DLF Cyber City’s Building 6, where numerous corporate offices are located.
Commuters and residents have been complaining of respiratory disorders and eye infections throughout the year. “The main cause of the dust is the broken road and heavy movement of vehicles during the mornings and evenings,” Amit Mathur, who commutes regularly on the stretch as his office is in the vicinity.
For Charu Sharma, a resident of Media Centre, dust pollution in the area is a “slow poison”. “It is choking residents of nearby areas. Every tree is covered by a thick coat of dust,” she said.
Manoj Joshi, an employee at an IT firm in DLF Cyber City, blamed civic agencies for not following dust mitigation norms. He said, “Water is not being sprinkled on the road regularly, and the construction material is mostly left uncovered. Why should we be made to suffer when there are norms which could have been followed to bring down the dust?”
The 2018 Clean Air Action Plan had clearly laid down that civic agencies need to ensure repairs and building of footpaths, vacuum cleaning of roads, implementation of street design guidelines for footpaths and cycle tracks with adequate vegetative buffers and paving of roads, blacktopping of road shoulders, introduction of wet and mechanised sweeping of roads and implementation of truck loading guidelines.
Moreover, according to the plan, the authorities should use appropriate enclosures for haul trucks and ensure gravel paving for all haul routes, sprinkle recycled water and build water fountains at major intersections, maintain pothole-free roads and increase green cover on central verges and on the roadsides.
Commuters said that no such dust mitigation measures have been implemented and autos and cabs are parked haphazardly along the stretch. “There is an absence of adequate parking facilities, so vehicles are mostly parked along the roadside. People waiting at bus stops or walking along the road are forced to inhale the nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants emitted by autos,” said Mohit Kumar, a commuter who takes the Rapid Metro from the area.
Asked about the maintenance of the stretch, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) said the road was transferred to developer DLF from HSVP in 2018.
Since then, the repair and maintenance of the road falls under DLF’s jurisdiction. “NHAI is in charge of two lanes around Shankar Chowk flyover. Most of the roads were transferred to DLF,” NHAI manager Dhruv Gupta said.
DLF, meanwhile, has no clue when the road will be repaired. “The stretch is part of the project work that DLF has been working on. I am not sure about the deadline,” a DLF representative told TOI.
Meanwhile, the Haryana State Pollution Control Board (HSPCB) said they will look into the issue. “We will take action in case dust control measures haven’t been implemented,” an HSPCB official said.