After remaining in limbo for seven years, the Tribune Chowk flyover project is finally moving towards execution, with construction likely to begin in April.
After floating tenders in the first week of February, the UT administration has received 12 bids for the project and is expected to finalise the executing agency within a week.
Officials said the bids were being evaluated by a high-powered joint technical committee. “We have received 12 bids and the evaluation is underway. The agency is likely to be finalised within a week. If all goes as planned, work will commence in April and the project will be completed within two years,” a senior engineering department official said.
The flyover, proposed to ease chronic traffic congestion at Tribune Chowk, has faced repeated procedural delays since it was first conceived — causing its cost to bump up from ₹137 crore in 2019 to ₹200 crore now, a 45% increase over seven years.
The receipt of multiple bids, reflecting active market competition, and the likely April start mark the most concrete progress on the project since the Union ministry of road transport and highways agreed to the revised estimate in July last year.
The proposed 1.6-km-long flyover will stretch from near the GMCH-32 roundabout to the railway overbridge towards Hallomajra on Dakshin Marg, passing over the perpetually busy Tribune Chowk.
More than 1.43 lakh vehicles, including 1.35 lakh passenger car units (PCUs) cross Tribune Chowk — the rotary on the intersection of Dakshin Marg and Purva Marg — on a daily basis, as per original traffic projections.
Initially, the UT administration had planned a 7-km flyover, which the Centre later scaled down to 3.5 km and subsequently to 1.6 km.
The foundation stone was laid on March 3, 2019, by then UT administrator VP Singh Badnore. However, work was stalled in November 2019 after the Punjab and Haryana high court imposed a stay on the cutting of trees along the proposed route.
Over four years later, the court lifted the stay in May 2024, noting that Chandigarh was built up and conceptualised in 1950, and cannot continue to remain like that.
”…the town was planned for 5 lakh people. Today, we are dealing with the tricity, which is now bound by Panchkula, Mohali and New Chandigarh, having a population of over 15 lakh. The issue of access and travel to Chandigarh on account of being the capital of two states as such has to be taken into consideration,” the court had held while rejecting arguments for preserving city’s original character.
“The need is to ease traffic in such situations rather than obstruct development. The stay has set Chandigarh back by a decade,” the court had observed.
But even after the stay was lifted, the project saw no further movement for months.
In March last year, Chandigarh member of Parliament Manish Tewari raised the issue in the Lok Sabha, following which the Union minister for road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari clarified that a revised project report and estimate were in progress after lifting of stay order, considering the substantial time gap since the project’s initial approval.
In January 2025, the ministry had also issued a stern letter, pulling up the administration over the prolonged delay in submitting the revised figures.
The UT engineering department finally submitted a revised cost estimate of over ₹200 crore in March 2025, based on the updated Schedule of Rates (SOR), and received the ministry’s approval in July. The administration then took another seven months to float the tenders.
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