BENGALURU: Nine-year-old Abhinav of Doddabommasandra in Vidyaranyapura, north-west Bengaluru, who hogged the limelight in 2015 after he wrote to Prime Minister
Narendra Modi highlighting traffic problem caused due to work on a flyover, can breathe easy now. The work on the long-pending flyover (rail over bridge) project along the
Outer Ring Road between the BEL Circle and Goraguntepalya is almost over.
The BDA and South Western Railway, who are executing the project, told TOI that the flyover will be open to public in 10 days. “Most of the bridge work is over and we are doing asphalting. It may take a week or so after which inauguration will be done. It will be a three-lane flyover extending up to 1.1km and facilitate two-way traffic at the junction,” officials said.
Abhinav, a student of
National Public School, Yeswanthpur, had written to the PM explaining how the pending bridge project was inconveniencing students like him. The PMO promptly replied to Abhinav and asked the
South Western Railways to speed up the project. The delay was attributed to a tussle between the railways and the defence department over sharing of land.
Though the project was conceptualized 15 years ago, the tender was floated only in 2012. However, the half-done project came to a halt in 2014 when land acquisition issues cropped up. Since then, travelling on the stretch has been a nightmare for thousands of road users as two railway gates were closed for passage of trains for about 20 times a day. Many a times, covering the distance from Goraguntepalya to BEL Circle, which ideally be 15 minutes, prolongs up to an hour.
BCS Murthy, a resident of Sahakaranagar, who takes the stretch to drop his daughter to a college near Jalahalli, said the particular stretch of ORR is the shortest route for those commuting between Tumakuru Road and Hebbal flyover. “It gets jammed all the time due to lack of a flyover at the railway crossing. The authorities don’t understand that fixing such simple problems can benefit many road users,” he added.