“The number of cars on the road are increasing — affordable cars like Tata Nano are coming which would further add load on the infrastructure. We should start work on Worli-Haji Ali Sea link and the Haji Ali-Nariman Point link simultaneously to save time,” he said, referring to another sea link in the chain that remains a contentious proposal decades after the idea of high-speed corridors linking suburban Mumbai to business districts in South Mumbai through a series of sea links was first discussed.

The last arm of the Western Freeway was to have been the Haji Ali-Nariman Point sea link, whose design has been altered several times over with no clarity yet on which model the government believes is ideal.

In fact, a sea link to Nariman Point has been shelved entirely, since this structure would mar the view of the government’s new ambition — a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji set to stand taller than the Statue of Liberty and located in the sea off Marine Drive.

Result: the final phase of the Western Freeway project could now be a combination of a sea bridge, a tunnel and then a shallow tunnel below Marine Drive, all of which, senior bureaucrats say, in private, are “overambitious plans.”

The consultants have recommended a sea bridge from Haji Ali to Priyadarshini Park, followed by a deep (drill and blast) tunnel via Malabar Hill to Tambe Chowk and then a cut-and-cover tunnel from Tambe Chowk to Nariman Point.

The 10.9-km link between Haji Ali and Nariman Point could be constructed on a build, operate and transfer (BOT) basis like the Worli-Haji Ali sea link, but this financial model too remains unclear. Similarly, the 22.5-km Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link (MTHL) proposed between Sewri in Mumbai and Nhava in Navi Mumbai has been on the drawing board for nearly three decades.

... contd.