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HH Chowk flyover to open Jan-end
Gurugram Repairs to the Hero Honda Chowk flyover will be completed within the next 20 days and the closed Jaipur-Delhi side of the flyover will open by January-end,
Gurugram Repairs to the Hero Honda Chowk flyover will be completed within the next 20 days and the closed Jaipur-Delhi side of the flyover will open by January-end, the contractor for the project said.
Opening the flyover will provide relief to commuters at Hero Honda Chowk, who have to travel straight on the service road, towards Delhi.
Officials of Valecha Engineering Limited, NHAI’s contractor, for the project, said that they were previously hopeful of finishing the repairs in a month but that it is taking more time to cut the concrete slab.
Rakesh Mathur, deputy manager of Valecha Engineering Limited, said, “The concrete is hard and workers are taking longer than estimated to cut through it. After the slab is cut, we’ll replace it.”
On October 31, the Hero Honda Chowk flyover was closed for commuters as the contractor had to carry out repair works. However, a ban was imposed on all construction activities by the Supreme Court-appointed Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (Epca) the next day. This ban was lifted on December 10 and the NHAI contractor started with the repair works to replace the damaged deck slab.
However, an RTI petition by Aseem Takyar has revealed that the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is yet to initiate any action against the contractor for the damages to the flyover, on the grounds that the matter is still under investigation.
One of the questions which the applicant had asked NHAI was if the security amount of the contractor has been forfeited.
Ashok Sharma, project director, NHAI Gurugram, replied to the RTI, “Since the matter is still under investigation, hence no punitive action has been taken against the contractor so far. The security amount of the contractor has not been forfeited.”
In May 2019, when the deck slab fell, Indian Technocrat Limited, the authority engineer for Hero Honda Chowk flyover wrote to NHAI, stating, “The damage has been reported through the entire deck slab which had been repaired earlier in consultation with IIT Mumbai and was still under observation.”
The incident last May was the second time that a deck slab had fallen off the same portion, with the first time being in April 2018.
RS Yadav, team leader, Indian Technocrat Limited, said, “We took extra care by mapping out the substantial area around the affected zone by performing additional ‘non-destructive testing’ (a testing and analysis technique used by industry to evaluate the properties of a material, component, structure or system).”
The eight-lane, 1.4-kilometre-long flyover was constructed as part of a three-layer crossing — flyover, underpass and surface roads — at Hero Honda Chowk. The construction of the ₹197.84-crore project began in November 2014 and it was opened to the public in 2017.
