Construction work halted across city after lockdown

As the Haryana government on Sunday evening enforced a lockdown across the city and, with it, halted construction activities till March 31, several projects of the

As the Haryana government on Sunday evening enforced a lockdown across the city and, with it, halted construction activities till March 31, several projects of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) that were nearing completion or whose construction was just about to start have come to a complete halt.

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These include the multilevel parking projects at Sadar Bazar and Kaman Sarai, Ambience Mall underpass, Shankar Chowk elevated U-turn and the foot overbridge (FOB) at Khandsa.

Gurugram was one of the seven districts where the state government enforced a lockdown from Sunday evening till March 31. A day later, the order was enforced across all districts in Haryana.

Gurugram has so far recorded eight confirmed cases of Covid-19—from Sector 9A, Palam Vihar, Nirvana Country, and Sushant Lok. The lockdown has been enforced to contain the spread of the Sars-Cov-2 virus by minimising human interaction.

The FOB at Khandsa Chowk was expected to be operational by next month, but the NHAI officials said that it is likely to be delayed till the end of April, or even further.

The original deadline for the FOB was January this year, but the ₹3 crore project got delayed due to the Environment Pollution (Prevention & Control) Authority (EPCA)’s ban on construction in the wake of high air pollution levels in October last year, and officials said that the lockdown has only delayed the project even further.

“The last two weeks of March were crucial for us as we were supposed to lay the girder slab across the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway of the FOB. In the last few weeks, most of our workers have gone back to their hometowns due to the Covid-19 scare. We don’t have the requisite manpower to complete the project. We anticipate that the construction will only resume once things settle down,” said Praveen Kumar, NHAI contractor for the Khandsa FOB.

On Monday, MCG commissioner Vinay Pratap Singh issued an order that all staff and contractual workers deputed across all fields will solely concentrate on ensuring that sanitation, sewerage, water, and streetlight supply remains uninterrupted throughout the lockdown period.

The order meant that all civic projects undertaken by the MCG, including the construction of a multilevel vehicle park have come to a halt.

The MCG’s proposal for a multilevel vehicle park has been static on paper since 2010. Earlier this month, the demolition of an old one-storey office of the Public Works Department (PWD) had started, which is the site of a multilevel vehicle park near the post office in Sadar Bazar.

MCG officials said that they were looking to commence construction next week, but with the lockdown, everything has come to a complete halt.

“There is a clear direction that all resources need to be allocated towards sanitation, sewerage, water, and streetlight supply, and work on everything else is halted in the interim. The main focus is to ensure essential service s are not interrupted under any capacity,” said Vinay Pratap Singh.

Barring a multilevel vehicle park at Sector 29, operated by the Haryana Shahari Vikas Pradhikaran, there is no other similar facility and parking is a major problem in the city.

As per the NHAI’s consultant, around 80% of the work on the elevated U-turn at Shankar Chowk is complete, while 70% work on the Ambience Mall underpass has been completed. The Shankar Chowk U-turn was expected to open next month while the Ambience Mall underpass was expected to open two months later. Officials said work on both is expected to be halted for some time.

“Before the lockdown order, the availability of daily-wage earners had started lowering as most of them had gone back home due to the Covid-19 scare. Even after the order is revoked, it will take some time for us to get the manpower and resume work at full pace. It is likely both the projects will be delayed by a couple of months,” Krishan Kumar, an official of RK Contractor, NHAI’s contractor for the two projects, said.