While stressing that the all- weather road project involving the four revered shrines of the state must be completed by March 31, 2019, the Chief secretary S Ramaswami asked the officers concerned to complete the processes of land acquisition and forest clearance by September 2017. He also said that from now onwards, weekly meetings would be held to monitor progress and to expedite the work during a meeting convened on Tuesday in Dehradun to take stock of the progress regarding the project .
While fixing deadline for all kinds of works, CS said he would meet the DMs, DFOs, competent authority for land acquisition (CAlA) and forest department officials after ten days to take stock of the status. They apprised that 70 percent work of land acquisition primary information, survey, public hearing and joint survey have been completed and the remaining works have reached the stage of floating tenders. Garhwal Commissioner has been instructed to convene coordination meeting with the departments concerned.
Notably, the ambitious all- weather roads covering 889 kilometers would cost an estimated Rs 11700 crore. While a tunnel between Chamba and Radi Top (Tehri and Uttarkashi) would be built, 15 big and 101 small bridges along with 3596 culverts and 12 bypass roads would come up too. With 29 spots being identified as landslide- prone area, all the roads would be equipped with crash barriers. Besides, public amenity centres would come up every 30-50 kilometers along the stretch.
There would be, in all, seven roads. While 140 kilometer Rishikesh-Rudraprayag would incur expenses of Rs 2166 crore 160 kilometer Rudraprayag-Mana road would cost Rs 1542 crore, 144 kilometer road between Rishikesh and Dharasu Rs 1627 crore, 124 kilometer road between Dharasu and Gangotri Rs 2079 crore, 95 kilometer Dharasu-Yamunotri road Rs 1920 crore, 76 kilometer Rudraprayag-Gaurikund road Rs 806 crore and 150 kilometer Tanakpur-Pithoragarh road Rs 1557 crore.