K.C. Venugopal Calls for Swift Measures to Tackle Kerala’s Highway Traffic Woes

Swift Summary

• Senior Congress leader K.C. Venugopal has written to Santosh Kumar Yadav, chairperson of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), urging immediate action to resolve traffic congestion caused by construction works on national highways in Kerala.
• venugopal also called on Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to deploy additional police personnel for better traffic management in affected areas.
• Key affected stretches include Ernakulam-Thuravoor and edappally-Thrissur, where passengers face important delays due to waterlogging and continuous rains.
• He demanded faster service road repairs, emergency vehicle priority lanes, and improved safety at construction sites.
• Criticism was directed at the NHAI for lapses in maintaining service roads and managing traffic effectively. Venugopal highlighted previous concerns raised by the public Accounts Committee about these issues.
• Legal interventions included a suspension of toll collection for four weeks at the Paliyekkara toll plaza following a Kerala high Court order, supported by a Supreme Court reprimand towards NHAI for neglecting infrastructure improvements while collecting tolls.
• Recent accidents were attributed to poor-quality construction work under NHAI oversight, such as an iron beam falling during ongoing work and girder collapses along NH stretches.

Indian Opinion Analysis

K.C. Venugopal’s appeal highlights pressing infrastructural challenges plaguing key national highways in Kerala amidst ongoing construction. The compounded issues-traffic jams worsened by inadequate service roads coupled with waterlogging from rains-underscore systemic inefficiencies within highway project execution under NHAI’s purview. The legal interventions from both state courts and the Supreme Court demonstrate growing frustration over unresolved problems despite public accountability mechanisms like Parliamentary Committees producing reports.For India’s broader infrastructure agenda, this issue reflects potential risks when local execution lags behind planning or fails to ensure basic standards of user safety during long-haul projects. effective stakeholder collaboration between state governments like Kerala’s administration and federal entities such as NHAI appears crucial here-not only to mitigate present disruptions but also prevent recurrence nationally as imaging highway modernization scales across states.

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