elevated corridor

Krishna Byre Gowda, Karnakata's Minister for Rural Development and Panchayat Raj (RDPR), is the Congress candidate from Bangalore North parliamentary constituency. Gowda, a second-generation politician, was first elected to the state Assembly in 2003, and was one of its youngest members at the age of 30. He was elected from Vemagal, which had fallen vacant after the death of his father Byre Gowda, a five-time MLA from the constituency. Gowda joined the Congress in 2004, and won the constituency again. In 2007, he was elected the President of the Karnataka Youth Congress Committee. In 2008, he contested and won from…

Vehicle numbers increase in Bengaluru Bengaluru's vehicle numbers has increased to 80 lakhs; with this, the city has overtaken Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai in terms of the number of vehicles. Now Bengaluru is second only to Delhi, which has 1.5 crore vehicles, according to Transport Commissioner V P Ikkeri. Bengaluru's 10,000 km of road length is considerably lower than Delhi 's 30,000 km. The total number of vehicles in Karnataka has now increased to 2.10 crore, Ikkeri said. Since five to six lakh vehicles are added each year to the city, the number of vehicles in the Bengaluru metropolitan area…

In a letter about the construction of elevated corridors, A N Yellappa Reddy, Chairman of the NGO Bangalore Environment Trust, has appealed to Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy to reconsider the project. Quoting his previous letter to Kumaraswamy, Reddy explained that hasty steps to start construction without assessing the carrying capacity and without the mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Social Impact Assessment (SIA) in an urban congested area, was potentially dangerous. This would massively impact the well-being of the entire population. In his letter, Reddy also produced proficient inputs from a report by Dr M K Ramesh, Professor of…

On Saturday, March 16th, Bengaluru saw a gathering of thousands of people who came together to demand for cancellation of the controversial elevated corridor and to better public transport, footpaths and safe cycling and a more balanced and sustainable development of Bangalore and rest of Karnataka as well. This mass action was organized by a large coalition of citizen groups’ in response to the awarding of environmental clearance for the controversial elevated corridors project and floating of tender for Phase 1 of Elevated Corridors. Since the govt. announced its intention of taking up 100 km elevated corridors in the city,…

I was pretty excited and went with a lot of hope to attend a 'Namma Karnataka' development conclave at Vidhana Soudha on February 17, jointly organised by a media house and Government of Karnataka. The event, however, turned out to be a major marketing and propaganda exercise of government’s infamous Elevated Road Corridor Project. Large flex banners highlighting the project had been put up at the venue, and the panel discussion on Bengaluru’s transport issues hardly had any discussion, and there was no question and answer session. Since I and many other invitees did not get an opportunity to voice…

The third part of this series on Steel flyover took us to the office of Naresh Narasimhan who was one of the principal architects of the Steel Flyover Beda movement which saw people from the city form a human chain from Chalukya Circle to Mehkri Circle on October 16 in 2016. A noted architect from the city, Narasimhan was quick to point out to me as we set up the camera: “I am not against flyovers, but against long ones which exceed a kilometre.” As the camera rolled, he got down to the nuts and bolts of this argument. “We…

Dear Chief Minister of Karnataka, With great urgency, in your very first budget, you have announced an undebated ‘Elevated Corridor’ project that has not had public consultation, and followed no due process. Another project is an untested technology called ‘Pod Taxi’, again not following any due process or transparency! These are listed neither in the master plan for Bengaluru, nor in any integrated mobility plan for the city. These will impact the 1.2 crore residents of the city in many ways. The Elevated Corridors project will cost the exchequer Rs. 34,000 crores, 151 acres of land, and almost 4000 trees.…

When the Karnataka government announced a flyover on Bellary road recently, citizens protested over the secrecy shrouded around the project. Their main contention was against the Bangalore Development Authority for silently moving the project without much details in public domain. The fact is that the State government had announced the project in its budget 2014-15, and kept pursuing it without transparency. In fact there are many grand infrastructure projects that successive governments have announced in the State budgets over the years, for which little information exists in public domain. Blame it on bureaucratic and political apathy, or on technical glitches…

Editor's note: We at Oorvani Foundation believe that it is important to give voice to all sides of a debate to make informed debates possible. Hence we provide space for multiple views, but the Foundation does not have any view of its own on any of the topics covered. Proposed elevated corridor network. Source: R K Misra As someone who wrote an article here on Citizen Matters supporting the Hebbal-Chalukya flyover, I wish to reply to this article by Prakash Belawadi and Naresh Narasimhan. To begin with, all the arguments I made on why civil society in Bengaluru should in…