A 700-metre road-cum-rail bridge outside Hyderabad has been under construction for 15 years, The Hindu reported, turning what should be a short crossing into a four-kilometre detour.
The bridge was conceived to connect Ghatkesar and Keesara and to reduce the traffic that builds up when the railway gate closes. It was estimated to cost around 35 crore rupees.
The project dates to 2012, when the government issued the land acquisition notification and the then Chief Minister, N. Kiran Kumar Reddy, laid the foundation stone. Work delays and compensation issues have attended it since.
The Railways completed the bridge structure over the railway tracks nearly a decade ago. The state government's portion of the work has not been finished.
The setting has changed considerably over the same period. The area sits just outside Hyderabad and has moved from a village panchayat to part of the city as urbanisation spread.
Telangana's Chief Minister, A. Revanth Reddy, represented the area as a Member of Parliament before taking office. Ch. Malla Reddy, who served as a minister in the previous Bharat Rashtra Samithi government, represented it for three terms as an MP and MLA. The bridge continues to remain a work in progress.
The design has changed too. The proposed Y-shaped bridge was subsequently altered into an L-shaped structure.
The unfinished structure has effectively split the town into two parts. Residents who need to reach the other side, which The Hindu reports is barely 50 metres away, are forced to travel nearly four kilometres by road.
Residents have gone on agitation several times, the latest being a bandh that received a wide response, with businesses closing willingly. An all-party Joint Action Committee leading the protests has warned that it will close the Hyderabad-Warangal highway if the government does not respond.
"Aren't three governments and three Chief Ministers enough to complete this small project", the committee asked.
On the project's own stated objective, however, the record is rather better than the committee allows. The bridge was commissioned to reduce the traffic caused by the closure of the railway gate. By remaining unbuilt for fifteen years, it has done exactly that.
The mechanism is straightforward. Traffic at a level crossing consists of vehicles that want to reach the other side. A four-kilometre detour removes a substantial share of those vehicles from the calculation altogether, and a journey nobody makes cannot queue.
Our analysts note that the delivered portion of the works supports the same reading. The Railways' half, the span across the tracks, was completed a decade ago, which means the bridge is finished over the only obstacle it was designed to cross. What remains outstanding is the approach, and an approach is a convenience rather than an engineering problem.
The Department of Unnecessary Research puts the rate of progress at roughly 47 metres a year and observes that the objective is therefore being met continuously, for as long as the work remains incomplete. Completion is the only event that would put the traffic back.