The city may finally get foot overbridges by August next year. The project got the approval of the corporators at a meeting of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Tuesday.
The long-delayed bridge project, whose work was supposed to begin in 2011 itself, finally got the much-needed approval at the council meeting. The BMC officials usually cited various reasons for delay in the project like modification in the design of the overbridge or land acquisition problems.
Construction of the foot overbridge is supposed to start by January, 2013 and should be completed within eight months, that is August.
Out of the three overbridges that will be coming up at Jayadev Vihar, Master Canteen and Rupali Square, two of them are embroiled in land acquisition-related problems.
According to the agreement, each overbridge will be developed at a cost of ` 2.5 crore.
In order to make the foot bridges barrier free, two of them (Jayadev Vihar and Master Canteen) will be provided with a lift facility and the one at Rupali Square will be provided with a ramp. Also it has been mentioned that all the three foot bridges will be completely different from each other in their designs.
According to the agreement, the contractor will profit from the advertisement that they will put up in the bridge.
The contractor will bear the construction, maintenance cost and the revenue from the advertisements will go to the contractor. BMC will receive ` 5.30 lakh annually form the contractor as revenue.
It was also decided that the valuation of BMC’s share in the Bhawani BMC mall would be handed over to the Housing and Urban Development Corporation Ltd. (HUDCO).
“HUDCO will provide us with a detailed value of our property in the mall after which we will sell out the commercial space based on HUDCO’s evaluation,” said Mayor Ananta Narayan Jena. BMC’s share in the Bhawani BMC mall is around 72,000 square feet.
The ground floor will be given to Saheed Nagar vendors who were evicted for construction of the Bhawani mall and apartments.
The municipal corporation has set up an in-house committee that is looking after rehabilitation of vendors back in the mall.
The evicted vendors have provided their documents that is being scrutinised by the committee whose outcome will be declared on November 3.
“The road and drainage repair work will also be spruced up in the internal areas. We are speeding up construction work everywhere keeping in view the upcoming corporation elections next year,” said Jena.
He also added that the special sanitation drive will be conducted in the wards where the sanitation work is being neglected. BMC has been trying to step up its sanitation drive for the past few months but no major difference has been felt so far.