3 min readMumbaiJan 15, 2016 12:51 PM IST
First published on: Jan 15, 2016 at 05:10 AM IST
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has roped in a Japanese consultancy firm for an ambitious project to design and plan a tunnel under Film City in Goregaon — an underground road that will be part of the Goregaon-Mulund Link Road — to be built at a cost of at least Rs 1,300 crore.
The firm, Pedico, has been contracted at a cost of Rs 2.3 crore to design and plan the 6-km tunnel which will be the first such underground road in the city.
The only other tunnel along Mumbai’s roads is on the Eastern Freeway, where a part of a tunnel had to be tunneled through. The 14.66-km Goregaon Mulund Link Road is being seen as an important east-west connectivity for the suburbs.
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Work on the three-year project is scheduled to begin from April, civic officials said. In the first of three phases, construction of the road over bridge (RoB) in Nahur will start, following which widening and removal of encroachments on the 150-metre A K Vaidya Marg will be conducted. The tunnel will be constructed in the final phase.
“Tenders for the RoB will be floated in April and the road widening will begin in May. We expect work on the tunnel to begin by the end of this year,” said Additional Municipal Commissioner Sanjay Mukherjee.
“Pedico will study the geo-technical aspects and will design the tunnel, which will be the first such tunnel in the city. People can then cover the entire distance in a maximum of 20 minutes,” said Mukherjee. Officials said regular work in Film City will not be disrupted during the construction of the underground tunnel.
The earlier plan was to widen Aarey Road to accommodate four lanes till Saki Vihar and then construct an elevated road till Mulund cutting through IIT campus, defence lands, the Bhandup water treatment complex as well as across crucial pipelines to the city.
“The previous alignment would affect water supply operations. We thus designed an alternate route which will now go under Film City,” said Mukherjee.
While the total cost of the bridge is estimated to be Rs 1300 crore, the civic officials expect the cost to increase. “The Nahur RoB will cost about Rs 92 crore and the tunnel will take up 60 -70 per cent of the funds. We have been working with the estimate of the project when it was an elevated road. But we have to construct two tube tunnels comprising two lanes each, which will be more expensive,” said a senior official.
arita.sarkar@expressindia.com
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