US firm to ready elevated road report

6 corridors planned to decongest city

Nearly five years after the project was conceived, the government has finally zeroed in on a consultant to prepare a detailed feasibility report (DFR) for construction of six elevated corridors to decongest core areas of the City.

The Karnataka Road Development Corporation Limited (KRDCL), which was asked to take over the project from the Bengaluru Development Authority a few months ago, has finalised an American engineering firm AECOM to prepare DFR for the project. The total length of these corridors is 82.7 km.

Of the six, three are main corridors with six lanes while the remaining are four-lane connecting corridors. Once complete, the corridors will enable commuting from one end of the City to another within 30 minutes.

The action on the part of the government in taking forward the project comes in the wake of severe criticism of City’s poor road infrastructure by IT and ITeS companies.

The IT bigwigs had threatened to shelve their expansion plans unless there was visible improvement in infrastructure. Following the threat, the government expedited clearance of big projects to ease traffic.

KRDCL has asked the agency to give a preliminary DFR in 90 days and  a final report within six months. The DFR includes not just the engineering details and design but also estimate of vehicular traffic, land acquisition issues, whether to go for a joint venture or adopt a Build, Operate, Own, Transfer (BOOT) model, mobilisation of resources and whether the corridors would really help to decongest the City, among others. Once the DFR is submitted, the government will call for fresh bids to execute the corridor project.

A senior official in the Public Works Department (PWD) said that two more agencies - International Consultants and Technocrats Pvt Ltd and Sak Engineering Consultants had participated in the bid. “AECOM was chosen because of cost and quality,’’ the official said.

AECOM has planned, designed and executed several projects in India including Sea Bird, Asia’s biggest Naval base at Karwar in Karnataka and the Hyderabad Metro Rail.