The much-awaited flyovers at Seelampur and Shastri Park will be formally open for the traffic from Saturday, bringing major relief to residents of east and north-east Delhi as well as those who regularly commute through these areas from Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad as they would now be able to escape the congestion on the Grand Trunk (GT) Road.
Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal will inaugurate both flyovers on Saturday afternoon. The PWD is the executing agency for both projects.
Talking about the finances, the estimated cost of the Seelampur-Shastri Park flyover project package was ₹303.31 crore, but the Delhi government has constructed both flyovers at a cost of ₹250 crore. PWD officials said the main six-lane flyover constructed on the Grand Trunk (GT) Road in Shastri Park has already been opened to vehicular traffic from Wednesday for testing the structural stability of the flyover before its formally going to open on Saturday. However, the two-lane single flyover at Seelampur will be formally open to the public only on Saturday.
PWD said the two flyovers are likely to cut travel time between Shahdara in east Delhi to Interstate Bus Terminus (ISBT) in Kashmere Gate by at least 10 minutes. At present, because of heavy vehicular movement and road encroachments, multiple bottlenecks are causing trafficsnarls on the stretch during peak hours and it takes about 30 to 40 minutes for motorists to cross that stretch
The construction work of these two flyovers had started in February 2019 and were to be completed by March 2020. But the projects got delayed by the construction ban in November 2019 on account of rising pollution and, later, by the riots in north-east Delhi in February. They were again stopped by the Covid-19 pandemic and the nationwide lockdown that came into effect on March 25. Their deadline was then shifted to July 2020, but work overshot the deadline for want of labour.