Urban News

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation — also on the finishing line of the South Delhi and Airport Express Metro lines, with starting points in NDMC areas — was initially supposed to hand over the roads undertaking Metro construction work to the NDMC in January this year. Intervention by the Centre had later pushed the deadline to May, which was subsequently set to August 10.

At present, eight of the 10 most important roads in the NDMC areas have still not been handed over to the municipality. These include Baba Kharak Singh Marg, Wellington Cresent, Humayun Road, Tughlaq Road, Rajendra Prasad Road and Raisina Road.

Senior NDMC officials said Metro work is still on at Park Street, North Avenue and Church Road, and the work to lay cables has just started. Restoration of the Central Vista, to be done by the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), has also suffered delay of eight months with digging work taken up by various agencies like the MTNL, ECIL, TCIL and DMRC

NDMC Secretary Santosh Vaidya said the corporation had given 800 road-cutting permissions in the last 18 months even as officials said the NDMC had to undertake total refurbishment of 30 per cent of its entire area, including cables, feeder pillars and streetlights.

According to official figures, the NDMC had to change 4,600 streetlight poles, taking away the old ones that were laid down in 1970s. On this day, 80 per cent of the work is done, with the NDMC having erected 4,200 poles already. Officials said the major roadblock suffered in dismantling old poles was that a major portion of a pavement was being dug up to take out a pole. Running short of time, the NDMC has undertaken an innovation now by cutting the old poles with gas cutters and then taking them out by digging a very small portion.

While NDMC officials accepted there were several inconsistencies and lack of coordination within the department, the fresh deadline to finish the works has been set to August 25.