The state Public Works Department said on Thursday that the Mumbai-Goa highway expansion project would be delayed by another two years.
There are 14 bridges on the highway, and work on them and the surrounding service roads is delayed, PWD Minister Ravindra Chavan said.
“We aim to complete this work in the next two years,” the minister said.
The project, 14 years in the making, has been marred by several factors, from delays in getting forest clearances and lengthy land acquisition processes to shoddy work by contractors.
Roughly 471 kilometres of the 555km-long highway lies in Maharashtra. The stretch includes industrial clusters such as Panvel, Indapur and Mahad, and tourist destinations such as Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg on the southern tip. The road is part of the BOT (build-operate-transfer) model. It was initially divided into 10 packages with different contractors.
Out of the 471km stretch, roughly 356km comes under the purview of the PWD. The section being managed by the National Highway Authority of India is divided into two parts, each 42km, from Panvel to Kasu and from Kasu to Indapur. Work is complete on about 39km of the first part and nearly 30km of the second part. However, some flyovers, underpasses, and bridges over rivers in areas like Gadap, Nagothane, Kolad and Talwali are still unfinished. Chavhan clarified that the state government will try to complete these within two years.
Every year, the condition of the highway and the delays in its expansion come into the news discourse just before the 10-day Ganpati festival, during which a large number of Konkan natives living in Mumbai have to use the road to travel to their villages in the Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts.
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For the past two days the highway is experiencing severe traffic congestion, as thousands of travellers make their way to Konkan.
Raigad Police are intensifying efforts to manage and control the traffic. To aid in monitoring and alleviating congestion, drones are being used to oversee traffic flow. Additionally, heavy vehicles have been temporarily restricted from certain routes, and more officers have been deployed at choke points to tackle the worst of the congestion.
