As 2017 begins, the feasibility report on the five-year-old proposal of the Mangaluru City Corporation to construct a state-of-the-art bus stand for private buses at Pumpwell is not yet ready.
The corporation council gave approval for the proposal in a meeting in June 2014. The project was conceived two years earlier by reserving seven acres for the purpose. It is still not sure if the project will take off this year.
With traffic snarls becoming order of the day in the central business district area, creating additional facility for private buses at Pumpwell is expected to ease traffic congestion in the heart of the city to some extent.
If officials are to be believed, the Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development and Finance Corporation (KUIDFC) is expected to get the report ready within a fortnight.
Replying to a question by Sudhir Shetty Kannur, a BJP councillor, at the city corporation council meeting on Saturday, Mohammed Nazir, commissioner, said the KUIDFC would prepare the report within a fortnight and it would be tabled in the next meeting.
The commissioner said that now it had been decided not to acquire more land for the project and the bus stand would be constructed on about 7.23 acre-land available. It was because the owners of the land nearby and the tenants had refused to part with the land for the project which is expected to cost Rs. 45 crores.
So far, the corporation was pondering over acquiring a patch of 136 cents of land having six houses and another patch of 19 cents land having a house close the 7.23 acre site reserved for the project.
The proposal has seen several ups and downs. At a meeting chaired by B. Ramanath Rai, Minister in-charge of Dakshina Kannada, decided to ask the Karnataka Housing Board to prepare the feasibility report. Later, the decision was changed and the KUIDFC was asked to prepare the report.
Earlier, the corporation had asked the Infrastructure Development Corporation (Karnataka) Ltd., a semi-government body, to prepare the concept plan. It submitted the plan taking into account the availability of only 4.5 acre land. According to it, only 66 buses could be parked in a two-storeyed bus stand. But the actual requirement of the corporation was to park 160 buses. Two options costing Rs. 77.67 crore and Rs. 134.46 crore, respectively, were given. But the requirements of the corporation had not been met.
