A pedestrian underpass will be built at the Chingrighata crossing of EM Bypass in east Kolkata, where a foot overbridge has recently been unveiled.
Urban development department officials said the underpass and the overbridge would ease pedestrians’ passage across the perennially busy Bypass.
The plan and the alignment of the proposed underpass, with a projected cost of around Rs 15 crore, has been cleared by a team of experts from IIT Kharagpur.
The team had proposed that an underpass be built along with the foot overbridge as a two-pronged approach towards reducing accidents at the Chingrighata intersection.
Construction of the underpass will begin immediately after a pillar of the New Garia-airport Metro is constructed right in the middle of the intersection, officials said. Work on the pillar is likely to be over by March.
The proposed underpass will be constructed at a depth of two-and-a-half metres underground and will be three-and-a-half metres wide.
The underpass will have an opening on Canal South Road that leads to Paridhan, a garment complex, on one end and have two branches on the other side.
One of them will lead to Sukantanagar and the other to the stretch in front of Jal Vayu Vihar complex.
The urban development department and RVNL, the executing agency of the New Garia-airport Metro project, will share the cost of the project, department officials said.
“The foot overbridge will be used mostly by people who want to board buses for Sector V. The underpass will be useful to a large number of people from parts of Sukanta Nagar and Shanti Nagar in Salt Lake,” said an officer of Kolkata police.
“People from Mahishbathan cycling to the garment park and other industrial clusters in the vicinity of the intersection will benefit from the underpass.”
The Chingrighata crossing — where roads from Sector V, Beleghata and Chaulpatti meet — is one of the busiest intersections on the 29km-long Bypass.
A recent report drawn up by the police has observed that the number of cyclists crossing this intersection has gone up manifold during the pandemic. Often cyclists come on the carriageway, resulting in accidents.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee had in November expressed concerns over the number of accidents at Chingrighata at an administrative review meeting in North 24-Parganas.
The police have decided that they will start next week the process of blocking a portion of the Bypass in the middle of the Chingrighata intersection and regulating traffic to understand the challenges they might face once construction of the pillar starts.
“Immediately after the trial run, we will draw up a report and send it to the bosses at Lalbazar,” an officer said.