The Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation ( BMRCL ) will dig up a substantial portion of the newly laid concrete Outer Ring Road (ORR) to build its proposed line to the Kempegowda International Airport Motorists had endured two years of traffic disruption for the white-topping of the stretch that cost about Rs 100 crore of public money. And yet, the city’s civic administration does not see anything wrong with this.As the median in most parts of the ORR is narrow, construction of the Metro will require breaking the new concrete roads. At Kalyan Nagar, where a Metro station is proposed, even the service road that has been white-topped is likely to be dug up.“The Metro corridor will come up on the median. We are aware that the stretch has already been white-topped. Building the Metro will not be difficult as there is enough equipment that can break a small portion of the road without damaging the entire stretch,” Ajay Seth, managing director of BMRCL, told ET.The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has spent about Rs 100 crore on whitetopping the stretch between KR Puram and Hebbal (three lanes each on either side of the median). The work on the 12-km stretch was started in December 2017 and is almost complete, except in places where flyovers and underpasses are located.BBMP does not believe this is a mistake and has no regrets about concretising the road before the Metro work starts.“To start our work, we cannot wait for the Metro to complete their projects. Citizens demand good roads. Metro work generally takes a long time,” Manjunath Prasad, BBMP commissioner, said.He said the Metro project is being built on 72 km of road and that it could expand to many more roads.Another senior BBMP official, who wished to remain anonymous, blamed the BMRCL for the confusion. “When the white-topping work on ORR was awarded, the BMRCL did not have a plan to build Metro between KR Puram and Hebbal. They changed their airport Metro plan only recently. By then, white-topping work had already begun. It was too late for us to stop the work,” he said.Urbanist Ashwin Mahesh batted for the formation of a Unified Metropolitan Transportation Authority (UMTA), a dedicated planning and coordination agency, to ensure such mistakes do not occur. “Because the projects were not thought of together, there was duplication of cost. To avoid such situations, UMTA — which is both necessary and required by law — should be formed. This will pave the way for integrated planning,” he said.The high-powered committee, Mahesh said, may not address coordination issues wholly as members of the committee keep changing, but the stakeholders (government agencies) remain the same. “There needs to be continuity in leadership at the official level. Not all the members who were part of one meeting will be there in the next meeting,” he said.