Dining at Faridabad

Faridabad lies within 25 kilometers of Delhi's southern region. It is bounded by the district of Gurgaon on the western region. It is bordered by Delhi's National Capital Territory up north. The Delhi and Mathura National Highway on the eastern and southern regions border Faridabad and passes through the very heart of its district.

There are many railway stations in the city. Most of them are located on the double track gauge line of the Northern Central Railway in Delhi and Mathura.

Faridabad is considered as Haryanas most populated city. Approximately 50 percent of the Haryana's collected income tax comes from Gurgaon and Faridabad.

Moreover, the city of Faridabad is situated on the banks of the Yamuna River. Majority of the land area now is developed into residential housings. The population began to grow extensively during the early 1990s. The local residents rely on underground water to cater to their basic needs like any other city, district or state in India. Rain is also their main source of water. Furthermore, the city experiences good monsoon season.

The city and district of Faridabad is famous for their Henna production in terms of agriculture and agricultural sector. Among their popular industrial products are motorcycles, tractors and refrigerators and switchgears, tires and shoes.

The popular tourist destinations in the area are the Suraj Kund Tourist Complex, Raja Nahar Singh Palace, Badkhal Lake Tourist Complex and Aravalli Golf Club along with Dabchick.

The district of Faridabad is separated into two divisions namely Ballabgargh and Faridabad for civil administration purposes. These are headed by sub-divisional officers.

Eating and Drinking Joints in Faridabad
Numerous restaurants, cafes and bars are located within the Faridabad district and city. These joints range from budget, mid to splurge. Below are some of the eating and drinking joints in the area.

The fast food chains are all over the place. Among the popular joints are Subway, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Haldirams, Sagar Ratna and Cafe Coffee Day. They are scattered and located in numerous malls all over the Faridabad district.

Red Chillies is a popular Chinese restaurant located in Sec 17. It offers crispy chili chicken, Hong Kong noodles, dimsum and a whole lot more. This restaurants specialty is the chicken momos.

The Pind-Balluchi is a goof place if you just want to eat and relax. It has an ambience of a village scene. Their dance floor looks discotheque and makes for a great party place. The ice cream counter has a lot of specialties like the Paan Flavored Ice Cream.

Sethis is a pastry shop locally famous for their delicious sweet treats. They serve and sell cakes of varied flavors and different kinds of pastries. It is located within the Sec 15 Market just across Mother Dairy.

Chickenette is situated adjacent to Sethis pastry shop. This restaurant is considered as Faridabads best secret. It has the hottest dishes in town. Its specialty is the Banzaara Tikka. Their vegetarian delicacy, the Paneer Tikka, is also legendary and is also popular among non-vegetarian guests. This fancy dining place is located along Sec 15 Market just across Mother Dairy.

Faridabad has some of the best coffee shops also. To mention some, there are Cafe Day in Saraj Kund, Nescafe in SRS Sector 12 Mall, Costa Coffee in Crown Interiorz Mall and Cafe LAffaire in Charmswood Plaza.

Badarpur flyover set to cross last land hurdle

The 4.4-km Badarpur-Faridabad flyover project now faces the last hurdle of getting about 2.5 acres of land in Badarpur. There are five land dispute cases related to the project pending in Delhi High Court. After months of delay, Delhi government has finally moved to take possession of an alternate plot for Badarpur police station which has to be shifted to pave way for the project.

National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) officials say the handing over of this plot to the private developer, Badarpur-Faridabad Tollway Ltd (BFT), is crucial since the main interchange for Mehrauli will come up on this stretch. A few days after the union road transport and highways minister Kamal Nath urged chief minister Sheila Dikshit to complete land acquisition on this patch, the land and building department issued a notification on Tuesday to take possession of an alternate plot within 15 days.

Officials said the lieutenant-governor resorted to an emergency clause to take possession of the plot. "As soon as the government takes possession of the land, we will move there into porta cabins. At a later stage, we will go for a proper building plan for the police station,'' said B L Sandhu, additional commissioner of police (land and building).

Delhi government sources said that though this panchayat land had been allotted for the police station earlier, a person claiming to be the owner of the plot had got a stay from Delhi High Court. "Now Delhi government is going to court, asking for lifting of the stay. We hope to shift to the new site soon,'' added Sandhu.

On their part, a senior NHAI official said, "We are concerned about the physical handover of entire land for execution of the project than the government taking possession on paper. We were supposed to hand over the entire land to the developer four months back.''

Meanwhile, the five cases related to the land on this portion will be coming up for hearing in the next couple of days.

Although this 4.4-km signal-free corridor was added to the list of Games-related projects later, handing over of the land on the Delhi side had been repeatedly delayed. Earlier, the DDA and NHAI were bickering over how land for the project was to be handed over and also over the compensation rates. Sources said that only a few days back, Delhi government decided to finalise the compensation rate by July 15.

The elevated corridor will be a crucial link between Delhi and Faridabad. The stretch, which includes a 3-km long six-lane elevated highway, was originally scheduled to be completed by December 2010 but was expected to be expedited to catch the Games rush in October. Only 15% of the work has been completed so far.

The project has already been delayed several times. The Haryana government had cleared the project in 2006 but Delhi government and Delhi Urban Arts Commission cleared it only in January last year.

IIT JEE results announced; Nitin Jain of Faridabad topper

Nitin Jain of Faridabad emerged the topper among more than 10,000 students who qualified in the IIT JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) 2009, the results of which were declared this morning.

Altogether 10,035 students, including 1,048 girls, succeeded in this year's IIT-JEE. The highest number of 2,831 students have qualified from the Mumbai zone.

Talking to UNI soon after the declaration of the results, Nitin said:'' I worked really hard for the exams but never expected such kind of success. But let me say this is no fluke, I really toiled for the exams.

''But the hard work does not end here. I have to go far ahead for which I will have to continue to work hard,’’ he added.

Incidentally, Tanvi Aggarwal, who recently topped the CBSE exams, also belonged to Faridabad.

A whopping 3.98 lakh students had applied for the JEE this year for admission to nearly 6,000 seats in 15 IITs. The results are available on the IIT JEE website from 0800 hrs today. The exams were conducted on April 12 this year.

Counselling of successful candidates for allocation of seats will be held from June 9 to 16. This year, admissions will also be made to two new IITs-IIT Indore and IIT Himachal Pradesh. Both new IITs will have 120 seats each. IIT Indore will be mentored by IIT Bombay while IIT Himachal Pradesh will be looked after by IIT Roorkee.

All seven of the old IITs at Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Roorkee have reserved 18 per cent seats for OBC candidates this year, while at the new IITs at Bhubaneshwar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Patna, Punjab, Rajasthan 27 per cent of the total number of seats have been reserved for the OBC candidates.

Do YOU know these Famous people from Faridabad?

* Maharani Kishori - wife of Jat Maharaja Suraj Mal of Bharatpur in Rajasthan, India; married in 1730.

* Raja Nahar Singh - Jat King of the princely state of Ballabhgarh in Faridabad (1823 – 1858)

* Sonu Nigam - Indian playback singer (born 1973)

* Richa Sharma - Indian playback singer (born 1972)

* Upendra Bisht - Global HR professional (born 1977) currently based in Dubai

* Ajay Ratra - Indian cricketer (born 1981)

* Mahesh Rawat - Indian cricketer (born 1985)

Service Tax Relief on Rentals

The Economic Times reported


Badarpur Flyover Progress Report

New year 2009 seems to have brought new hopes for the city of Faridabad. This long neglected district which was once a glorious industrial township was recently being dubbed as Gurgaons poor cousin. Connectivity was a major bottleneck.

A flyover at Badarpur was proposed for long due. After almost two decades of flip-flops, the contract was finally awarded to Hindustan Construction. The project is scheduled to be completed by end 2010.

The progress is also visible. On both sides of NH-2 digging of roads apparently to create provision of service roads is quite visible. Infact at some places the depth is so much that even today one could feel as if it is an elevated road.

However, this road might mean bad news to some of the existing commercial establishments. The upcoming mall at Destination Point, which was earlier being developed by Senior Builders, rechristened as Indiabulls Mega Mart, could be affected by the flyover because of non-access from the new flyover. The IT Park by Vatika group could also face the same issue.

The flyover is to conclude someone near the Sarai Chowk, beyond Sec 37. The Abacus Techno Park developed by Crown-Aerens could be marginally affected depending on the end point of the flyover. However, the prestigious Crown-Interiorz mall by the same developer looks beyond the concluding point and could rather get the connectivity advantage and may attract visitors from adjoining Sarita Vihar and other parts of South Delhi. Similarly the RPS IT Park may also remain unaffected.

Exact impacts would be known as and when things shape up.