The highway connecting Bhubaneswar and Puri

Cuttack, Nov. 21: Orissa High Court on Wednesday issued notices to the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) to file a status report on the construction of the 59km of four-lane highway stretch between Bhubaneswar and Puri.

The court issued the notices on a petition, which expressed apprehension that completion of the project, which was supposed to be over by September 2013, might not be ready even before the Nabakalebar of Lord Jagannath in July 2015.

The petition, filed by way of a PIL, had sought the court’s intervention for completion of the four-lane project required to deal with the huge rush of devotees to Puri on the occasion of Nabakalebar.

Traffic will increase exponentially in 2015 when lakhs of tourists visit the temple town to witness Nabakalebar or the renewal of the wooden images of Lord Jagannath and His siblings.

The last Nabakalebar was held in 1996. The present single-lane NH-203 gets jammed during festivals.

Nishikanta Mishra, a high court advocate, had filed the petition. He cited on the basis of information assessed through the RTI that pending court cases were posing hindrance to progress of project work.

When the petition came up for hearing first on September 6, the division bench Chief Justice Amitava Roy and Justice A.K. Rath adjourned the matter for hearing, along with details of the pending cases. The court expected the petitioner to submit the details within a week.

After Mishra submitted the details of two cases, in which the high court had issued interim stay orders on eviction proceedings initiated for the four-lane project, hearing on the PIL was adjourned twice.

Later, the Chief Justice transferred the matter to another bench.

The division bench of Justice Pradip Mohanty and Justice Biswajit Mohanty, before which the matter came up, vacated the two stay orders and issued notices to the NHAI seeking responses within two weeks on the progress of the project and the cause of delay.

The bench also issued notices to the state government to file its response within two weeks.

The two stay orders, vacated by the court, are related to the eviction cases at Pipili and Batamangala.

The 59-km stretch of the four-lane highway project includes four bypasses in Bhubaneswar, Pipili, Chandanpur and Batamangala, one railway overbridge, three major bridges and 18 minor bridges.