New Delhi: Barely days before Union home minister Amit Shah is scheduled to inaugurate the Barapullah Phase-III elevated road, unidentified people have cut off and stolen around a 20-metre-long patch of its ‘bridge screen’ — a steel barrier covered with polycarbonate sheets — near Mayur Vihar.The screen is designed to provide additional protection against vehicles accidentally falling off the bridge and to prevent noise from heavy vehicular movement spreading to adjacent areas.The 3.5 km four-lane elevated corridor across Yamuna directly connects Mayur Vihar in east Delhi with Sarai Kale Khan in the southeast.Govt officials engaged with the project said that in the absence of the steel barriers, the safety of people using cycle tracks and footpaths alongside the elevated road could be compromised as well. The screen covers both sides of the road, and its installation work is around 90% complete, they said.“These screens, which have been installed continuously along the extreme outer edges of the bridge corridor above the crash barriers, are fabricated using mild steel frames, with polycarbonate sheets securely fixed within the mild steel frames,” said one of the officials.A Delhi govt official said that they came to know about the theft two days ago. “When workers returned to work in the morning, they found a large patch of the bridge screen was missing. On closer inspection, they found it had been cut off. They informed their seniors who alerted govt officials,” said the official.A PWD official said they have lodged a complaint with Delhi Police regarding the theft. However, cops said they were yet to receive any complaint.The project was approved in 2014, with construction beginning a year later. It was originally targeted for completion in 2017 but faced repeated delays, leading to an increase in the cost from an original Rs 1,261 crore to around Rs 1,635 crore.Both ramps of the elevated corridor have been completed. One connects the Mayur Vihar side, while the other links with the existing corridor near Sarai Kale Khan. The extradosed bridge, a hybrid structure that combines elements of both a cable-stayed bridge and a traditional girder bridge, across Yamuna has also been completed and forms part of the connecting structure for the elevated corridor.The corridor — the 10th road overbridge across Yamuna in Delhi — will provide a direct, signal-free link between east and south Delhi. By bypassing major bottlenecks and signalised intersections, it will significantly cut travel times for commuters travelling between areas like Mayur Vihar, Patparganj and Trilokpuri in the east as well as Noida, and hubs like Sarai Kale Khan, Jangpura and AIIMS.
