Ten old buildings standing in the way of the Kachahri-Sandaha road widening were demolished on Tuesday, as the Varanasi Municipal Corporation (VMC) and the Public Works Department (PWD) cleared the stretch from Golghar near the courts to the Police Lines crossing.
The buildings had been declared dilapidated by the VMC some time ago. Their owners had been served notices earlier, the corporation had a public announcement made in the area a few days before the drive, and the buildings had already been vacated, according to the officials who carried out the demolition. Taking down buildings already judged unsafe also removes a separate risk on a road this busy, where old walls and balconies stand right at the edge of the traffic.
The joint team reached the spot on Tuesday afternoon. It was led by VMC zonal officer Jitendra Anand and K.K. Singh, executive engineer of the PWD's Provincial Division. PWD assistant engineer Monu Nayak and junior engineers Dharmendra Gupta, Deepak Gupta and Govind Dubey were also on site.
Before the machines moved in, barriers were put up on the Golghar side and at the Police Lines crossing, and traffic was sent along other roads. People standing near the buildings were moved back, and JCB and Poclain machines then took the structures down one at a time.
Six bulldozers were working on the corridor on the first day, and a large police force was deployed along the stretch. The drive went ahead despite some objections from residents.
The demolitions are only the first visible step of a much bigger job. According to the PWD's project figures, the Kachahri-Sandaha road runs for about 9.5 km and is being rebuilt as a four-lane road at a cost of about Rs 250 crore, which works out to a little over Rs 26 crore a kilometre. Work on widening the road is also under way on the Sandaha side.
Anyone who uses the road knows why it is being widened. Kachahri is home to the district courts and the collectorate, and lawyers, litigants and people with work at government offices crowd it every day. The narrow section between Golghar and Police Lines has long been a bottleneck for all that traffic. Road works have been holding up traffic elsewhere in the city as well, as our report on four corridors that stayed jammed while works dragged on found earlier this month.
Police also registered a case of alleged assault at the Golghar crossing on Tuesday. Javed Zafar, a resident of the Golghar Kachahri area, alleged that while he stood at the Golghar crossing at about 12.30 pm during the demolition drive, he was abused, beaten and hit with a brick. Cantonment police inspector Rajkishor Pandey said an FIR has been registered against Tanveer Ahmad and unidentified others.
Tuesday's drive is the latest in a string of widening projects in the city that have needed buildings to come down first. In the old city, the last remaining buildings on the Dalmandi stretch were razed under heavy security on Monday, and before that the PWD had started shifting sewer lines there ahead of a storm-water drain. The order of work is the same in both places: clear the line of the road first, then build.
What the cleared land on the Golghar to Police Lines stretch will look like, and when, is not yet clear. Neither the VMC nor the PWD has given a date for finishing the four-lane road, and the details shared so far leave open how many more buildings, if any, still stand in its path.
Until the stretch is finished, commuters heading to the courts or towards Police Lines can expect barriers and diversions on days when machines are working. Leaving a little earlier on weekday mornings, when court work begins, is the simplest way around it.
Wednesday brings a second reason to plan ahead. Under the traffic police's diversion order for the VVIP visit to the city, autos and e-rickshaws may be kept off the Police Lines, Chaukaghat and Teliabagh roads if the need arises, so anyone using the Kachahri side of the city should check routes before setting out.
