Amidst allegations of the project being no answer to the city’s traffic problems, Deputy Chief Minister (Dy.CM) and Bengaluru Development Minister on Monday said only two companies had shown interest in the Expression of Interest (EI) floated by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) on building the proposed tunnel roads. Mr. Shivakumar said the deadline will be extended to encourage more participation.
The announcements came on a day when a private company made a presentation on the project to Mr. Shivakumar at an event that was not open to the media.
The project is one of the Congress government’s most contentious - of converting the proposed 99-km-long elevated corridor network crisscrossing the city into tunnel roads. Expected to cost nearly ₹50,000 crore, the government is looking at implementing it on a public-private-partnership (PPP) mode.
Aecom, an international consultancy firm that has worked on multiple tunnel road projects across the world and had also prepared the Detailed Project Report (DPR) for the elevated corridor network project in 2017, had made a proposal for the tunnel network project last month.
The tunnel roads along a different alignment and elevated corridor network projects were first proposed by K.J. George when he was Bengaluru Development Minister in the earlier Congress regime, attracting the ire of civic activists and mobility experts. With the proposal making it to the Congress manifesto for the 2023 Assembly polls and now making significant strides towards implementation, objections are being raised again by the public. Many have termed it a “tunnel vision” and a result of “short sightedness.”
Sandeep Anirudhan, citizen activist, said the kind of money that the government estimates to spend on this tunnel project can instead be spent on developing an entire multi-modal infrastructure for Bengaluru, which includes mass rapid transit, metros, suburban, more buses, last and first-mile connectivity, cycling lanes, pedestrianisation, etc., and can make Bengaluru a “truly international city.”
