Underground Cabling For Hyderabad

Ugly cables and electric poles in the city may soon be a thing of the past. The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation has come out with an ambitious plan to lay underground cables stretched across 840 kilometres.

The underground cabling would be implemented in a specially-designed tunnel, which will also accommodate water pipelines.

However, work on the cabling will be completed in different phases. Under Phase-I, underground cables will be laid in roads spread across 170 kilometres in the GHMC limits, at a cost of nearly Rs. 700 crore.

Talking to reporters after holding a meeting with the officials of APCPCDL, HMWS&SB, telecom and cable operators, GHMC Commissioner M T Krishna Babu said that the roads to be covered under the first phase have already been identified, and that work would be completed within 3 years.

Once the underground cabling is done, no department will be allowed to dig roads for the next 5 years, he said.

In a pilot, underground cables will be laid on a stretch of 3.2 kilometres, from Charminar to Falaknuma, and on 4.25-km stretch from Indira park to Nallakunta.

The pilot project will be completed within the next 8 months. A consultant from Mumbai has been hired for the project. However, the GHMC will take formal approval from the Standing Committee to execute the project.

Krishna Babu said that the model was successfully executed in several metros, including Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.

The project will be extended to all colonies in the GHMC limits at a later stage, he added. Further details will be worked out in the next meeting to be held on next Friday, the Commissioner said.

The GHMC Commissioner said that re-modeling of roads on a 100-kilometre stretch would be done before the Biodiversity Summit to be held in October this year. Ministers from 193 countries are likely to participate in the event.

The state government has already sanctioned Rs. 200 crore for the project, and another Rs. 800 crore has been sought from the Centre for work related to the Biodiversity Summit, he said.

He also said that a committee led by Municipal Administration and Urban Development principal secretary Sam Bob will monitoring work related to the summit.

Krishna Babu said the stretch from JNTU to Malaysian Township would be developed as the Road Corridor. However, an approval would be required from the Standing Committee to initiate the project, he said.

The GHMC Commissioner also said that against the target of Rs. 650 crore, the GHMC has, so far, collected property tax of Rs. 410 crore. He said that weekly review meetings were being held to hasten the process of tax collection. (INN)