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.