BENGALURU: Bengaluru Smart City Ltd (BenSCL), which has been working on redeveloping Commercial Street, has now decided to whitetop the 750m stretch. Work on this began on Friday.
Some traders said this would affect their Christmas and New Year sales after they have already had to endure two pandemic years. Mayank Rohatgi, secretary, Bengaluru Commercial Association, said if whitetopping was all BenSCL wanted to do, it could have been done long ago without taking up about 18 months. “And, this is the one week of the year when our sales are high. That is also being affected now,” he told STOI.
But Sanjay Motwani, president of the association, said there will be tests while trying anything new.
“It is in no one’s interest to delay the project. A street so busy is open to massive movement of vehicles and pedestrians and then there are technical challenges in carrying out works,” he said. “There is some infrastructural inconvenience, but they (traders) need to bear with it for their betterment.”
“There were two options before us — relay the cobblestones or finish the road work in a month through whitetopping. On consulting the traders and technical team in the government, we decided to whitetop the stretch,” said P Rajendra Cholan, managing director of Bengaluru Smart City Limited.
