Three years ago that thecountry’s first landmark sea bridge “ Rajiv Gandhi Bandra Worli Sea Link “ wasinaugurated in Mumbai, marking a giant public infrastructure leap for thecountry’s commercial capital.
Now, Mumbai is on verge of offering another landmark “the country’s first tunnel on an urban transport network in north-east part ofthe city, heralding a significant infrastructure addition for the citizens.
Implemented by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region DevelopmentAuthority (MMRDA), the 505-metres long twin-tunnel is nearing completion on theEastern Freeway Project (EFP) and will provide an easy, hassle-free directaccess from South Mumbai to Ghatkopar, and will be ready by January 2013.
Last week, the MMRDA proudly declared that after blastingthrough five lakh cubic metres of earth and stones, the engineers finally shookhands with each other from either side of the tunnel under the 1,300 metre tallhill near the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.
This does not mean that Mumbai’s urban transport woes haveended. The growing infrastructure has failed to keep pace with the increasedvehicular.
Presently Mumbai has around 18,00,000 vehicles on theroads, including two-wheelers, three-wheelers, four-wheelers, light and heavyvehicles, trucks, buses and other types of vehicles.
All these ply on a small, 2000-km long road network,throttled by marine boundaries on all sides, with four creek bridges connectingthe Mumbai island to the mainland.
Though nearly five dozen flyovers have been constructedin the past two decades, traffic snarls instead of reducing, seem to beincreasing with each passing day in Mumbai.
The harried government is now exploring other publictransport options like the under-construction Mumbai Metro-Railway, theMono-Railway, and improvements in the existing suburban railways networkcriss-crossing Mumbai, and the EFP.
Constructed at a cost of over Rs.60 crore, the 10-metreshigh, 17-metres wide, eight-laned twin tunnels will help improve vehicularmovement towards the industrial hubs of Thane, Navi Mumbai, Pune and Nashik onone side and the bustling commercial hubs of Mumbai on the other.
The tunnels fall on the Rs.200-crore Anik-Panjrapole LinkRoad in central Mumbai which are part of the 22-kms long EFP.
According to the MMRDA, once completed, the EFP willslash the travel time from Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus to Ghatkopar toaround 25 minutes instead of the existing 90-100 minutes, entailing huge fuelsavings, too.
Envisaged as a traffic signal-free, toll-free accesscontrolled road, it has seen dawn after shifting around 5000 structures enroute, 30 religious shrines and other impediments over the past few years.
After concretising both the tunnels from inside andlaying a concrete road besides electrical and safety aspects, by mid-2013, thesecond tunnel will also be opened for vehicular traffic.
Road tunnels are not new in India, but a majority havebeen in remote areas, generally connecting two or more urban centres.
For instance, there are tunnels on the Mumbai-PuneExpressway “ another first in India, a tunnel near Mumbra in Thane district, orthe famous Jawaharlal Nehru Tunnel which connects Jammu with Kashmir on theJammu-Srinagar Highway.
The Mumbai’s EFP tunnels are India’s first such facilityconstructed within the city limits for a major urban transport project.
Now, the two next mega-projects are an ambitious,high-speed proposed Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link and the new international airportnear Panvel, on the mainland.
