Gurgaon: govt agency refuses to give up ‘dear’ land The total number of vehicles traversing National Highway-8 across Gurgaon stands at nearly five lakh a day. With such a large volume of traffic, the service roads of the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway appear to be bursting at the seams during peak hours. Making matters worse, these service roads are either too narrow for steady traffic flow or broken to the extent of being intractable. Result: inordinate congestions during peak hours, accidents, soaring tempers and a dangerous spillover on to the main carriageway. “As a concessionaire, we have constructed the service roads as per the design given to us by the National highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the measurements of the roads are governed by the land made available by the authority. There are certain parts of the expressway where the service road is incomplete because of land acquisition issues,” said a spokesperson of DGSCL, the concessionaire firm. “We have been repeatedly asking Haryana Urban Development Authority (Huda) to give us a 15-metre-wide strip of land to stretch these roads and add two more lanes, but the proposal is hanging fire. We can’t proceed until we get the land,” said a senior NHAI official. The issue has been kept in abeyance even as Huda had agreed to it at a meeting on February 13, 2012, the official added. Also, the NHAI had asked Huda to construct parallel sector roads. “Huda had given all the land that the NHAI had wanted in the beginning. The NHAI has been saying that at places our ancillary structure in the form of some sector roads are absent and we should build so that pressure on service roads is reduced. It is not that they are asking for extra space. Huda has to proceed with a plan and we cannot keep giving land as asked. Generally, all our sector roads parallel to the service roads are in place” said Huda administrator Praveen Kumar. Sources say, land being a precious commodity in Gurgaon, the government does not want to part with it at costs at which the NHAI – itself a government arm – would acquire it.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 06:46:03 +0000
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