Proposed Versova-Virar sea link could help establish a ring route around Mumbai along with five other roads, some of which have already been built.

Mumbai: The Maharashtra government has proposed to build a new multi-crore sea link on Mumbai’s western coast, partially reverting to a decade-old plan of having a garland of roads around the city through the Eastern Freeway on one side and a network of sea links on the other.

The new sea link is proposed to be built from western suburb of Versova to Virar, a densely-populated urban sprawl in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.

The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), the state agency in charge of the project, will conduct a pre-feasibility study for the proposed sea link.

“This study will be useful to determine the traffic via different modes on the route and conduct an estimation until 2050 and beyond. It will help us with broad cost estimates, indicate technical and economic feasibility, as well as suggest best possible alignments for the sea link,” an MSRDC official said.

“The idea is to further enhance mobility between the city and its suburbs by forming a ‘garland expressway’ through various projects, and a Versova-Virar sea link will help extend that connectivity to MMR,” he added.

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The ‘garland expressway’

The MSRDC hopes that a Versova-Virar sea link will help establish a ring route around Mumbai along with five other roads, some of which have been built, while some are still on the drawing board.

On the eastern side, the proposed ‘garland expressway’ will include the existing Eastern Expressway, an arterial road along Mumbai’s eastern suburbs that begins from Thane, and the Eastern Freeway, which is an elevated road from Ghatkopar to south Mumbai that was opened to traffic in June 2013.

The eastern side is proposed to be connected to Mumbai’s western coast by another proposed project, which another state agency, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), has planned.

This will be an elevated road to link the proposed Sewri-Nhava Sheva trans-harbour link (the main connector proposed for the Navi Mumbai International airport) to the Eastern Freeway and the existing Bandra-Worli sea link.

On the western coast, the road garlanding will be completed with three sea links — the Bandra-Worli sea link, the under construction Bandra-Versova sea link for which preparatory work started last month, and the newly-proposed Versova-Virar sea link.

Currently, the road distance between Versova and Virar is about 62 km and takes nearly two hours to cover. The new sea link is proposed to be 42 km with interchanges at Madh island, Kandivli, Gorai, Bhayander, Vasai and Virar.

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Flip-flops over sea links

The plan to have a freeway along the city’s western coast through a string of sea links to decongest travel to the crowded western suburbs and create a ring route around Mumbai with the eastern freeway is more than a decade old.

The original idea was to have sea links right from Nariman Point in the south to Versova in the west. The landmark Bandra-Worli sea link was built as part of the same plan. The contract for yet another sea link from Worli to Haji Ali was scrapped after differences between the contractor and MSRDC, the agency in charge of implementing the project.

Around 2011, the state government decided to consider building a coastal road on reclamation and stilts from Nariman Point to Kandivli, a far western suburb, saying it will be more economical than sea links and will create space for green lungs in the city. The plan for sea links was then put on hold.

Seven years on, neither the proposed sea link-based freeway nor a coastal road has been concretised on ground, while the plan has been altered again to build a combination of both.

The current plan is to build a coastal road from south Mumbai to the Worli end of the Bandra-Worli sea link and another Bandra-Versova sea link from the Bandra end to provide an uninterrupted commute until Versova.

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