Bhubaneswar, Aug. 31: A diversion to facilitate faster travel to Puri and better communication to 11 villages is raising chaos concerns in Pandra.

The new Bhubaneswar-Puri national highway (NH-203) meets the Chennai-Calcutta national highway (NH-5) at Pandra. This confluence of the two highways has sparked traffic chaos worries as the area experiences heavy traffic volume. To facilitate smooth flow of traffic in the area, experts of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) feel a flyover was necessary. However, the absence of any such proposal has raised concern.

Sources said on a single day NH-5 carried nearly 55,000 passenger car units (PCUs), which is a measure of its high vehicular volume. Similarly, the NH-203 carries nearly 15,000 PCUs in a day. Once the traffic flow from NH-203 gets diverted to NH-5 at Pandra after completion of the road, there will be a huge traffic mess.

Echoing the fear of local residents, an NHAI engineer admitted that “keeping in mind the rise in population and city’s development, there should have been a flyover at this junction to reduce traffic. But so far this has not been included in the designing process”.

A resident of Laxmisagar and urban management practitioner Piyush Ranjan Rout said: “A flyover should be constructed where at the junction where the two highways meet. This would help traffic coming from Cuttack or Bhubaneswar city to take a turn and pass through the Pandra intersection where the NH-203 traffic gets diverted towards NH-5. The NHAI authorities should have planned the flyover from the very beginning. Building it at a later stage will cause inconvenience to the public.”

The existing NH-203 connects the capital city with Puri from Rasulgarh Square, but as the traffic congestion on the road has become a perennial problem, the NHAI has planned a diversion of the NH-203 near Pandra. The work on the construction of the diversion is likely be over by Nabakalebara, the auspicious occasion when the idols of Lord Jagannath, Balabhadra and Devi Subhadra will be changed.

All stakeholders hope that the 67.25km NH-203 diversion with several by-passes and one railway flyover between Bhubaneswar and Puri gets ready before the auspicious occasion. The present single-lane NH-203 from Rasulgarh to Puri is nearly 60km long, but it gets heavily congested with the religious crowd swelling during festivals.

Sources in the NHAI said that the construction work would involve an investment of Rs 500.29 crore by a consortium while another Rs 193.78 crore would be provided to it as additional funds by the highway authorities.

Apart from facilitating traffic to Puri, the NH-203 diversion from NH-5 will also provide better and faster communication facilities to 11 villages staring from Pandra near Hi-Tech Medical College and Hospital and ending just before the Daya bridge near Lingipur on the city outskirts.

Speaking to The Telegraph, NHAI project director Aditya Kumar Ray said: “A flyover like the one at Manguli Square near Cuttack may come up at the point of diversion of NH-203 in future.”

He also added that the public works department of the Odisha government was planning to have a one-way road on the existing Daya West Canal, which will be extended from Palasuni to Garage Chhak. With two roads sharing the traffic burden from the city-end, the load on the NH-203 diversion will be less.

“We have kept in mind the rate of urbanisation in and around Bhubaneswar and growth of Puri and nearby pockets. To address that the NH-203 diversion will include four by-passes. New bridges will also be constructed to manage the congestion,” Ray added.