The widening of Canal Road will begin as soon as Saturday (tomorrow) on the section of the road from Jinnah Hospital to The Mall, said Communication and Works Department officials.
Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif told C&W officials that they would be in charge of the project a week before the Supreme Court finally announced its verdict on Thursday on a petition challenging the plans to add an extra lane to each side of the road.
“We were told to start the construction work within 48 hours of the [Supreme Court] decision ... hopefully the work will start from tomorrow,” said M Amjad, deputy secretary for project coordination at the C&W Department.
He said work would begin on the Jinnah Hospital to The Mall section because that was the busiest. The section from Thokar Niaz Baig to Jinnah Hospital would be widened next.
Amjad said that the chief minister had tasked the C&W Department with executing the project because of its performance in building the Kalma Chowk flyover in record time. “We will try to finish this quickly also,” he said.
Officials of the C&W Department, the National Logistics Cell, the builder for this project, and the National Engineering Services of Pakistan held meetings and visited sites after the Supreme Court announced its decision. The Traffic Engineering and Transportation Planning Agency (TEPA) had previously been in charge of the project.
Tepa Chief Engineer Saifur Rehman said that he had heard that the C&W Department had been put in charge but they had received no official notification to this effect.
The Punjab government first decided to widen the road in 2006 when Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi was chief minister. It gained clearance from the Environmental Protection Department in July 2007 and the Planning and Development Department approved Rs1.56 billion for the widening of the road from Thokar Niaz Beg to Dharampura in early 2008.
The current government headed by Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif revived the plans in 2009 in view of the increasing traffic load, approving the ‘remodelling’ of the road from Thokar to the Harbanspura interchange, but the estimated project cost by that time had swelled to Rs3.5 billion.
The road will now be widened in sections as per the orders of the Supreme Court, unlike before when the plan was to start work on the whole road simultaneously, said Israr Saeed, Tepa’s director for traffic engineering.
Saeed, who had been in charge of the project when it was in Tepa hands, said that around 3.5km of the road would widened at a cost of Rs900 million. The project will benefit 200,000 commuters, he said, and ease the traffic flow on the Canal and surrounding roads.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 16th, 2011.
COMMENTS
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ