Tenders for Goregaon-Mulund road, 3 third east-west link, soon.

The BMC is about to start work on tendering for the Goregaon-Mulund Link Road (GMLR), the last and the longest of the city's three planned east-west links.

The 16-km GMLR will comprise a 9-km elevated road from Saki Vihar to beyond LBS Road in Mulund, and the 7-km Aarey road from Western Express Highway to Saki Vihar, which will be widened and re-laid with cement-concrete. The other two east-west connectors, Jogeshwari-Vikroli and Santacruz-Chembur Link Roads, are 10.8 and 6.45 km long and were opened in March. GMLR is expected to give much-needed relief to the congested WEH.

Tenders will be invited in three months and work is expected to start in six months. The planned alignment is such that BMC officials hope the project to be implemented without hiccups: there will not be any issues of land acquisition, re-settlement, green cover destruction or socio-political intervention. As per an earlier plan, the road was proposed to pass through Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and thus got stuck in clearances. Also, the work would have been costly and time-consuming as a portion of the route would have required the construction of a tunnel.

TOI