First, build on the ground, then underground

Bengaluru’s Sankey tank underpass flooded.

It was reported yesterday that Karnataka Dy.CM and a team of senior officials would visit Singapore to get a first-hand experience of tunnel roads so they can build similar underground roads to decongest Bengaluru. Ambitious much?

A few years ago, Bengaluru got an underpass system called ‘Magic Box’, where they created box-shaped passages under existing roads to ease traffic. But these ‘Magic Boxes’ often became ‘Tragic Boxes,’ especially during monsoon.

Just last month, on May 21, a software engineer from Infosys drowned in a ‘Magic Box’ underpass at K.R. Circle in the heart of Bengaluru. Some of these underpasses were shut down a few years ago as they were inefficient. It makes one wonder, we can’t even build simple underpasses, and we dare to develop underground roads?!

Do we need a study tour to figure this out? Why not ask the technical team from Singapore to visit and do a feasibility test? What will a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats study and come back with?

In 2014, when the then head of the Legislature’s Estimates Committee was asked if it was not a waste of taxpayers’ money that the Government was sending 18 MLAs for a ‘study tour’ to Brazil, Argentina and Peru, he said, “We are not committing a big crime… don’t you send school children on vacation…similarly MPs and MLAs are being sent through the legislature committees…”

He is correct, but people should know that the MLAs’ study tour report is worse than a school child’s. Here’s an example.

A group of MLAs went on a study tour to New Zealand and Australia in February 2014. They returned and reported thus: “We saw sheep and cows grazing in open lands. This is something our government must focus upon. We visited a reservoir, and we were happy. We visited the rainforest and studied the serious negative impact of cutting trees. The caste system is absent there. People are more disciplined. More pay-and-use toilets are present there.” WOW! Does one have to visit these countries to know these facts? Of course not. Same with the underground road.

Underground roads are complex to build and costly to maintain— first, the safety issues. We are unable to rescue people from a small underpass. Can you imagine what will happen if there is flooding in an underground road?

Imagine if there is fire underground? The fire engines and ambulances will have difficulty getting through as traffic rule-breakers would have taken up the service lane.

This is not fear-mongering; fire and flood are serious issues in confined spaces like underground tunnel roads. During the Gotthard Tunnel disaster in Switzerland in 2001, the underground fire reached such high temperatures that cars in the tunnels were fused together!

Infrastructure-wise, an underground road needs numerous emergency exits for people. Efficient ventilation and exhaust systems are required, considering thousands of vehicles emit carbon monoxide in a closed space.

Underground tunnel road.

There must be proper evacuation protocols — security systems to watch and secure the tunnel. You need well-trained staff to handle all these services, and most importantly, all this costs money.

When it comes to financial viability, the cost of building and maintaining underground roads is exponentially more expensive than surface roads. There is digging involved, and it needs huge and expensive machinery. There are huge amounts of concrete and reinforcement steel to hold the tunnel. It is estimated that it would cost us about Rs. 1,200 crore in India for just one mile or 1.61 kilometres of underground road!

Here is an example of how expensive and time- consuming underground roads are. In Boston,

United States, they built a 12-kilometre-long underground road through the heart of the city. It took them 15 years to complete and cost them 2.6 billion dollars, that’s about Rs. 20,000 crore!