Heavy presence of pedestrians on the narrow and congested Kali Temple Road has come in the way of wrapping up the foundation work of the Kalighat skywalk, which had started a year ago, Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) engineers said on Sunday.
Underground piling for the structure began in January 2022 and only around 210 of the proposed 320 foundation piles have been constructed so far.
It will take at least another four months to complete the remaining piles, engineers said.
In March 2019, the state government had announced that the skywalk, which will be similar to the one in Dakshineswar, would be ready in 18 months from the start of construction.
But after a recent assessment of the work that has been completed and the portion that remains unfinished, a team of KMC engineers concluded that the skywalk would not be ready before the end of this year.
According to structural experts, piles are the most preferred type of foundation to support overhead piers because they provide greater resistance to vertical and horizontal action on the bridge deck.
“Kali Temple Road is so narrow and congested that bringing in rigs to start the foundation work on the remaining stretch is proving to be a challenge. Forget two rigs, even one is hard to accommodate,” said a senior KMC official supervising the construction.
“On a narrow stretch, work on the construction of two piles cannot be taken up simultaneously.”
The main structure of the skywalk, which will cost the state exchequer Rs 300 crore, will stretch around 430 metres and come up over Kali Temple Road, from its intersection with Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Road. An arm of the skywalk, around 50m long, will descend towards the Kalighatfire station.
The width of the skywalk will be 10.5m.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee, while inaugurating a multi-tier parking complex in Alipore recently, had instructed mayor Firhad Hakim to speed up the construction of the skywalk. “Please ensure that the work is completed fast,” Mamata had told Hakim from the dais.
On Sunday, engineers said the four-storeyed building being built to rehabilitate the hawkers who had to be relocated to facilitate the construction of the skywalk would be over by September.
“The skywalk may take another two months more to be completed,” the official said.
To expedite work, officials have decided that fabrication of the skywalk beams would start immediately on the stretch where the foundation work is over and a pier-cap has been constructed.
“We want to go ahead with structural work on the section of Kali Temple Road where the foundation work is over to ensure things get done faster,” a member of the KMC engineering team said.