The Gwarko Overpass is planned to operate officially from Friday where Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is scheduled to inaugurate the fly over. The Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport has informed that vehicles will be operated from the overpass with the inauguration. Last Saturday, the leadership of the Road Department, including Minister for Physical Infrastructure and Transport Devendra Dahal, had inspected the site and directed it to prepare for vehicle operation. Pradeep Bhandari, Senior Divisional Engineer of the Road Department, Quality, Research and Development Center, informed that preparations have been made for vehicle operation with the completion of the main structure of the overpass. The construction of the overpass was started in 2021.
Although the project was scheduled to be completed by Feb 2024, the deadline was extended several times. Bhandari informed that after the construction of the main structure, lane separators, lining, and traffic lights were completed, the vehicle operation is now in a state of readiness, Bhandari said. After the operation of this overpass, vehicles will not have to wait long at Gwarko and will be able to move around continuously.
The government had started the construction of an overpass at Gwarko Chowk to manage the heavy traffic on the Kathmandu Valley Ring Road. The first overpass was built at Gwarko Chowk among the three congested areas on the expanded road section from Koteshwor to Kalanki under the Ring Road Expansion Project. The overpass, which is 6 meters high and 455 meters long, has a ground clearance of 6 meters and a ramp of 180 meters on the right and 110 meters on the left for vehicles to board.
On 24 Feb 2022, Ashish-Samanantar Religare JV won the overpass contract for 176.88m through a national level competition. After it was not completed by the initial deadline, it was extended for two times. As per the said agreement, the 40-meter reconstruction of the overpass was postponed for another month. He said that the target of completing the Gwarko overpass by April 2025 was set, but the construction was postponed for another month due to rain. The overpass under construction at Gwarko Chowk in Lalitpur has been taken forward under the Engineering-Procurement and Construction (EPC) model. Under this model, there is a provision that the contractor company has to pay compensation if the construction is not completed within the specified period. The Road Department, Quality, Research and Development Center, which is paying compensation accordingly, has stated.
After the first extension of the deadline, the construction company had to complete the work by 23 Dec 2024. After that, a compensation of 0.05 percent of the contract cost must be paid for each day after that. It is said that the compensation amount will increase with the delay and will reach a maximum of 10 percent (after 2000 days).
The construction of the Gwarko overpass is expected to ease traffic on the Satdobato-Koteshwor road section of the ring road and the Mangal Bazar-Imadol-Lubu road section. However, it will not solve the traffic jams in the long term, says transportation expert Ashish Gajurel. Although the wide road will provide relief from the traffic jam problem for some time, he says that the problem of traffic jams will recur after the number of vehicles gradually increases.
As the number of vehicles is increasing day by day, the traffic problem is sure to arise again after some time. Traffic management has become a huge challenge in the Kathmandu Valley, where about 1.4m vehicles ply, in recent years. This problem, which has arisen due to the increasing number of vehicles, does not seem to be easily solved immediately. He says that public transport should be operated effectively to reduce traffic pressure. According to him, there are 6.5m registered vehicles in Nepal, where the number of public vehicles is less than 4 percent. 80 percent of the total number of vehicles are motorcycles. “If there is reliable public transport, consumers will change their mode of transport,” he said, “only this will prevent road jams in the long term.”
