Govt unable to acquire land to hand over to Army establishment in lieu of Defence land in Shillong
Shillong: While improper planning and rapid urbanization continue to take its toll in overcrowded Shillong city, the Joint Special Committee comprising State government officials and Defence authorities has not been able to make much headway as far as its duties were concerned.
The Committee was constituted in 2013 to expedite the process of handing over of Defence land in the city to the Government but as usual unavailability of land has created obstacles in its path.
Army authorities have time and again expressed their willingness to hand over their land to the Government in the city provided that they are allotted equal measure of the land by the State government which had even identified land for the Army authorities in Ri Bhoi but things did not go as planned.
While the Committee is yet to make any significant progress, Shillong city continues to become more congested with a growing number of vehicles and the same old and narrow roads which often lead to huge traffic jams.
With the narrow roads chock-a-block with unending lines of vehicles, the plan of the State government to construct flyovers in the city has remained a non-starter though the plan was conceived years back.
A flyover from the Civil Hospital junction to General’s Point was about to become a reality as the Defence establishment had agreed in principle to hand over 0.339 square kilometer of land near Garrison Ground to the State government and had demanded equal measure of land in return but the dilly dally tactic of the State government has prevented the proposed flyover from becoming a reality.
There was another proposal to construct a flyover from Raps Mansion to Sweeper Lane but the project could never take off as the land acquisition problem was never solved.
Earlier it was believed that the thousands of trucks, both loaded and unloaded, which ply through the capital city were the root cause of traffic jams in Shillong, but the myth was busted when the Shillong Bypass was opened to traffic two years back (May, 2013) and traffic jams have continued to remain a daily feature in the life of Shillong residents.
Incidentally, the State government has remained unperturbed at the failure of the flyover plans as is evident from the fact that the State’s PWD minister has asked his department officials to survey the area from Umshyrpi River till 7th Mile in Upper Shillong to study the feasibility of constructing a flyover to ease traffic problems on that route.
Mention must also be made of the ambitious idea of the Meghalaya government to introduce cable cars and mono rails to de-congest Shillong city which, however, sank without a trace.
