War of words between Army, PMC stalls work on Nagar Rd

A Skirmish fermenting between an Army unit in the city and the civic body has stymied repair work on the Nagar Road in Viman Nagar

War of words between Army, PMC stalls work on Nagar Rd

A Skirmish fermenting between an Army unit in the city and the civic body has stymied repair work on the Nagar Road in Viman Nagar. The road, in question, is notorious for its many accidents involving two-wheelers, chiefly because of a gap where a tarred service path joins the concrete main road.

Fighting matter: The service road near Dunkirk Lines opposite the Agakhan
Palace. Pic/Jignesh Mistry

The workers of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) had hardly started work around 11.30 am, when some Army jawans descended on them, they claimed, asking them to halt all activity. This place is a little ahead of the Aga Khan Palace, opposite an Army unit called Dunkirk Lines. The 300m-stretch is opposite the main entrance gate of the base.

Earlier, the PMC demolished the compound wall of the army base for road widening and promised to build them a new one. They built the new wall, all right, but the army is far from satisfied.u00a0 The PMC executive engineer Nandakishore Karale said the repair work was vital as two-wheelers frequently skidded on the gap between the service road which is made of tar and the main concrete road.

"The army jawans refused to give any reason for stopping the work citing that they were acting on the basis of instructions they had received from their superiors. We finally tried contacting one Captain James Alex who too did not answer his mobile phone.

Conceding to their earlier demands, we had built a second compound wall for their base, behind the earlier one, which we demolished to widen the road. A signal was also installed on the junction so as to favour their vehicles plying in and out of the base," said Karale. "The media has been constantly highlighting the issue of this killer-stretch for the past several months and so we decided to undertake repair work pronto." More than 10 bikers severely injured themselves over the last two months.

Shoddy work
While the PMC has striven to exonerate itself of any wrongdoing, the Army is in no mood to let it go.
It was the shoddy job done by the civic body that piqued the Army.u00a0u00a0"Work on one of our gates on the Viman Nagar airport route too is remaining to be completed by them. The boundary wall constructed by them is beginning to fall at one end," Captain James Alex said. Even after repeatedly shooting off letters to the PMC regarding the remaining work, it was completely ignored, he said.

The PMC Officer on Special Duty (OSD) Vinay Deshpande said, "A decision regarding this will now be taken on the official level. We have done all the requisite work asked by the Army but cannot understand what more do they want." The overall work is funded under the centrally-funded Jawarharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).u00a0