“Traffic problems on National Highway 8 (Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway), specially near toll plazas, are a cause of concern,” said Kobayashi, who has been living in Gurgaon for more than a decade since the company set up its Indian headquarters in the city in 1997.

“I was caught in long traffic jams at several occasions,” he said, adding he keeps a time margin when he heads for the airport to avoid missing his flights.

Noting that Gurgaon has rapidly emerged on the world map, Kobayashi said its dynamic growth and fast becoming a growing hub of MNCs deserves appreciation but its poor infrastructure and lack of maintained roads was the “dark side of the story”.

Speaking on Canon’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, he said that enrolment of girl children in senior classes in Ferozepur Namak village in Mewat district, some 35 km from Gurgaon, increased by 45 percent from last year after Canon adopted the government school in the village.

The number of teachers at the school also increased from nine to 44.

Canon undertook the responsibility of developing the village infrastructure in November 2012 to provide seamless support to its inhabitants with core interventions in eye care, education and environment for a period of three years.

Other CSR projects undertaken by the company include adoption of three Rapid Metro stations for creating a green belt around them in Gurgaon and a photo exchange programme between Canon India and Canon China wherein kids in the adopted villages in both countries click pictures with Canon cameras and share them across boundaries with each other.

Canon India now plans to initiate its village adoption programm

Alleging this as “breach of trust” NHAI has complained that the operator DGSCL resorted to “dishonesty” by diverting toll for its own use. NHAI has said the concessionaire, its directors, officers and other persons were party to “criminal conspiracy” with intent of fraud.

NHAI referred the case after the highways ministry asked it to lodge a criminal case against the operator as it was first reported in TOI on Tuesday. The ministry had issued this advisory after TOI had reported how a week-long study of traffic flow at 32-lane toll plaza in July had exposed average underreporting of at least 79,000 daily. The daily toll collection was less by Rs 15.58 lakh during that period.

The authority has also alleged DGSCL of committing forgery of valuable securities by making false documents and electronic records, book of accounts etc for underreporting of toll and used them as “genuine”.

NHAI has also said that Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) had directed it in July 2011 to investigate the toll issue and subsequently in December that year they had appointed KPMG to carry out traffic study. NHAI in its complaint to EoW has claimed the operator never cooperated citing some “trivial” reasons until July this year.

“The complaint has just come to us. It suggests that there is a dispute of share distribution of collections. We will have take help of our financial experts in probing this particular matter,” said a senior EoW officer.

DGSCL in a statement again refuted the traffic numbers put by KPMG through their manual counting process. “It appears that KPMG has not done any traffic count study but has only presented the figures provided to them by a third party vendor, which is a security service company. Our toll plazas are equipped with the most advanced automatic vehicle classification and counting (AVCC) system which is completely computerized and there is no scope for human error or intervention. We are scrutinizing the manual data given to us and once the data is proven to be incorrect we would take strong action against the parties responsible for this,” a company spokesperson said.

Source-http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com

The re-carpeting and re-construction of MG Road will be completed six months, the Public Works Department (PWD) has said. PWD officials said the heavy vehicular traffic on the stretch was delaying the work.

The work was taken up last month when Gurgaon and Delhi surburbs were witnessing heavy rains. This in turn caused traffic to stop for nearly two hours during peak hours, an official said.

Geeta Parashar, a resident of DLF Phase 2, said, “There seems to be no order at junctions. What is the point of constructing roads when traffic is not regulated and the entire project is poorly managed?”

About two lakh vehicles ply on MG Road — one of the busiest stretches in Gurgaon — daily.

The MG road re-construction began at two points — the Sikanderpur Metro Station and near Guru Dronacharya Metro station. The work was stopped for days due to heavy rains and was resumed in early September.

N K Tomar, Executive Engineer, PWD (B&R) said, “Initially, when the Gurgaon-Faridabad Road was being constructed by the PWD, the commuters were hassled. But after the road was constructed, many have described it as one of the best stretches in Gurgaon. Similarly, due to high vehicular traffic on MG road, the project has seen many delays. At the Sikanderpur Metro station, we blocked the entire carriageway as there was a service road to reroute traffic. At Dronacharya Metro station, we blocked only one side of the carriageway as there was no service lane to divert traffic. The work was slow in these areas keeping the traffic in mind,” he said.

“The work at IFFCO Chowk, which sees maximum traffic, will be carried out towards the end of the project. We intend to divert traffic towards the HUDA City Center Metro station — onto the NH8. The project will take another six months to complete. The PWD and traffic officials are meeting regularly to chalk out plan to avoid any massive traffic disruption in the area,” Tomar said.

Source-http://www.indianexpress.com/

Smart tags and cards have been a puzzle for commuters since the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway was inaugurated. While many daily commuters claim that they are not even if smart tags are still in use, others complain the limited validity of recharge on smart cards makes its usage cumbersome.

“I have no information about a smart card being issued nowadays and have not even seen any of my friends, who regularly travel between Delhi and Gurgaon, using it. These cards have not been endorsed properly and it seems they don’t want us to use the cards at all”, said Vivek Kamboj, an environmentalist and a resident of Gurgaon.

After the Comptroller and Auditor General’s performance audit of the Gurgaon Expressway in 2008, a specially constituted panel of parliamentarians had taken up the issue.

It had recommended that the NHAI should have a mechanism to monitor the toll plazas with a view to prevent putting the users through unnecessary harassment by way of illegal and unscrupulous methods of toll collection. The committee’s report stated that it understood that the renewal of monthly tags, issued by the concessionaire, is inconvenient to the users.

The committee therefore recommended that these tags be converted into smart cards and can follow the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) smart cards pattern which is renewed after exhausting the amount.

According to information revealed by an RTI, the NHAI observed that when it came to concession for local traffic, there was a lapse of balance amount after its expiry within a month in various cases.

The NHAI further directed the concessionaire to take immediate steps so that no balanced amount lapsed from the card or tag issued to the local traffic from March 2010 onwards. An independent consultant later reported to the NHAI that the concessionaire could not be penalized for lapse in the balance amount, as the clause was not a part of the agreement.

The same consultant in 2011 had reviewed DGSCL’s annual report on the working of toll collecting system and suggested that lapse in balance of discount schemes needed to be reviewed.

After protests on the imposition of toll, the concessionaire introduced tags at discounted rate in 2008. This was later improvised to smart cards in 2012, which the DGSCL, after court directives, is now pushing for. However, the smart cards, though issued free of cost unlike the tags, still carry a validity expiry period of one month if not used adequately. Though the concessionaire told HT that there were cards for which there is no validity of recharge and the balance could be carried forward, but the cards had no discount rates.

Source-http://www.hindustantimes.com/