What could be more UP than this? A bridge constructed two years ago in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor was meant to connect villages nearby to three states - Uttarakhand, Haryana and Punjab - but it leads to nowhere.?
The bridge over the Ganga near Balawali came up in 2019, but two years on, the bridge remains unused. No one can get there because there is no approach road leading up to it, the?Times of India reported. It was reported that land disputes and lack of money have left the bridge non-functional.
The project was initially sanctioned in 2015 and launched a year after that with a budget of Rs 40 crore. The plan to construct the bridge was with the objective that it will cut downtime drastically between the adjacent areas and other states.?
Haridwar, for instance, would be 50km closer. It would serve as a bypass for Muzaffarnagar. And it would take pressure off of NH-119 and NH-74.?
By 2019, it was fully constructed. But then, an administrative?confusion held up the last leg of the project - 200 metre approach?road towards Haridwar side of the bridge which was "mistakenly" identified as government?land when it wasn't. It was actually a farmer's land.?
The owner opposed the construction on what was his land. When that dispute was resolved, officials said the budget had run out.
¡°Work on the bridge has been completed. It is a UP government project. When the project was being planned, we had asked for reports on landholding from the revenue department. It had then said that the patch of land where the approach road was planned was government and panchayat land,¡± PWD executive engineer Sunil Sagar told TOI.??
It was then when the land dispute cropped up. While the land dispute has been sorted now, however, the budget is said to have gone up from Rs 40 crore to Rs 55 crore because of the erosion of Ganga.?
"The revised proposal has been sent to the state government. Once that is released, the approach road will be completed," Sagar added.?
The deadline for the project, which was May 2018 and later moved to 2020, has been pushed back further.