Akshay wants you to call him. His number has been scrolled over a cable tray under Connaught Place’s middle circle and with the number of visitors walking past the digits since Thursday he may just get what he wished for. To find his number you will have to climb down a flight of stairs near Pallika Bazaar Gate No. 6, go past an engineer who is explaining to a confused visitor in great detail what “D-walls” or “diaphragm walls” are and walk along neatly stacked telecommunication, electric, water supply and irrigation lines.
Akshay was probably like 29-year-old Chetan Mehta who decided to spend an afternoon checking out “how things are done in the government” and came to inspect the utility corridor thrown open to the public as part of the New Delhi Municipal Council’s centenary celebrations. Chetan works in an electronics company but it was not his fascination for electric wires that brought him to the tunnel, it was just curiosity on what lies beneath.
Several visitors who came to gawk at this Rs.265 crore project planned as part of the Connaught Place Redevelopment Project just came out of curiosity. “They just wanted to know what were people doing here all these years,” says a representative from Engineers India Limited, which executed this project, giving away the inordinate delay in the project since work actually began in January 2010. “Even shopkeepers and residents of CP came to have a look,” he said.
While a father wanted the engineer to explain to his “prospective civil engineer” son what went into making this technological feat, elsewhere freelance architect Piyush Satyarthi was keenly observing how the cables were neatly arranged. “Connaught Place is the most popular Central Business District in the country,” he says after much deliberation. “There were a lot of problems because of the various service cables and the ills of road-cutting…” he said, about how the idea for the common duct for various services came about.
“You would have only seen something like this in Hollywood movies but there it’s always sewage lines. Here it is different utilities,” he adds. For future plans, there are even provisions for hot and cool water when the project to centralise the CP area and do away with window air conditioners that spoil the heritage look, comes into place.
For now, there are red, blue and green pipes that 13-year-old Gauri is able to identify uses for. “The red is for fire fighting purposes, blue is for normal water and green I think is air supply,” she says.
