KATHMANDU, AUG 23 -A Chinese technical team is scheduled to arrive in Kathmandu on Wednesday to conduct a study on widening the Ring Road. According to the Ministry of Physical Planning and Works, the main objective of the visit is to complete preliminary work on the road design.
The team will spend 40 days in Kathmandu to do a survey for widening 9.5 km of the 27-km long Ring Road in the first phase.
Ministry officials said that the 18-member team would include geotechnical engineers, traffic engineers, material engineers and other technical experts. “They will start preliminary work with the assistance of engineers from the Department of Roads,” said a ministry official. The Chinese engineers will collect data related to traffic volume, types of vehicles that run on the project area, labour charges, transportation fares, sources and prices of construction materials, existing system of public utilities such as drinking water, telecommunications, electricity and metrology within the project area and geological data.
Kamal Raj Pandey, joint secretary at the ministry, said that the team would complete the preliminary work in Nepal and finish the final road design by November. “If things go as planned, construction work of the first phase will start in January next year after internal bidding by China,” he said.
In the first phase, the government plans to improve a 9.5 km stretch from Gongabu-Jhamsikhel with a grant assistance from China. The Ring Road improvement project will upgrade the current four-lane road to eight lanes (a four-lane, two-way main road, a four-lane, two-way relief road, a two-way bicycle path and a two-way pedestrian path, including bus stations and parking lots). Nepal and China had signed an agreement to widen the Ring Road under a grant assistance from China during the visit of Chinese Vice-Minister for Commerce Fu Ziying in February this year. The road widening work is expected to be completed by 2013 utilising resources received as grant assistance from China annually.
The northern neighbour has been providing RMB 150 million in grants to Nepal annually. On Feb 28, 2011, the Chinese government had agreed to provide a grant assistance of RMB 50 million (Rs 547 million) for widening the Ring Road and other projects. The technical team will design a simple urban flyover; three pedestrian overpasses will also be built. Even though the locations for the flyover and overpasses have not been fixed, the project is likely to select Kalanki Chowk to build the flyover with a signalised intersection underneath for pedestrians.
However, the Ministry of Physical Planning has recently permitted Innovative Concept to construct overhead bridges at Kalanki and Gongabu Bus Park based on the decision of Kathmandu Metropolitan City. “The ministry should have waited for the detailed design of the first phase,” said an official at the Department of Roads. “Construction of the bridges might affect the road widening work.”
A high-level official at the ministry said that China had agreed to undertake the Ring Road widening project thinking that there would not be any hurdles in the way.
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