Lt. Governor V K Saxena issued strict instructions to all stakeholder agencies, including PWD, the Forest Department, the Home Department, DUSIB and DDA amongst others, to complete all pending tasks related to decongestion of 77 corridors for improving the flow of traffic within three months, according to sources from Raj Bhawan.
On being informed that most of the work pending since 2019 is related to removal of electric poles and power transformers, Saxena expressed grave displeasure and directed officials to ensure total inter-departmental coordination and completely do away with the habit of conveniently and unjustifyingly using court orders as alibis and excuses for non-performance.
He asked the Chief Secretary, who was present in the meeting, to sort out all pending inter-departmental issues and fix a timeline for completion of each task at hand. The LG also instructed them that it be ensured that the timelines are met and in case they are not, responsibility be fixed, the sources said.
Of the pending 119 tasks as many as 58 were required to be acted upon by the PWD. Removal of trees at 08 places, jhuggis at seven places and religious structures at 17 places apart from minor tasks like replacement of power transformers and poles and five tasks related to non-availability of adequate parking outside banquet halls, were inordinately delaying decongestion on important stretches that included Mehrauli-Gurgaon road, Mehrauli-Badarpur Road, Ring Road (Vijay Nagar to Burari Chowk), Loni Road (from Shahdara GT Road to Loni Border), etc.
Pointing out that the authorities first let unauthorised religious structures and jhuggis come up and then went on to move files to remove them, the LG issued instructions that any ongoing activity in this regard should be stopped forthwith before proactive intervention by authorities concerned should ensure that any such activity is nipped in the bud before it starts, in future. He underlined that he would personally monitor this and any deviation from the directions will be taken very seriously.
As regards the matter related to ‘Religious Places Committee’ that decides on the removal of religious structures, it was decided that a meeting of the committee will be held every last working day of the month and all pending cases will be decided upon therein.
In the matter of parking at the sites of banquet halls, it was decided that the DDA will hand over identified lands to MCD on institutional/notional rates and the MCD in turn would, instead of getting into the existing revenue sharing model, involve the association of banquet halls and get them to construct multilevel parkings at their own cost in lieu of, the land provided by MCD to them.
Task Force teams for each traffic range were created in January 2017 with an objective to act on major travel corridors in consultation with all stakeholders to improve traffic flow. The Task Force teams had identified 77 corridors of around 400 km for improvement. The tasks identified for this purpose comprise of road engineering interventions to address choke points, regulation through augmented traffic police deployment and systems, manual intervention during peak hours and continuous action against unauthorised parking and removal of encroachments on these corridors.
While much headway had been made with regard to the first three, works remained stalled even after 5 years due to non-removal of encroachments and unauthorised structures.