Hebbal Tunnel: Two Work Fronts, One Frozen Corridor

The National Green Tribunal has frozen half the Hebbal tunnel and left the other half running.

On October 16, its southern zone bench in Chennai barred tree removal along the 2.2-kilometre route. Work on vacant land inside the veterinary college campus on Bellary Road is untouched.

The Greater Bengaluru Authority is now running two schedules on one project: a live site and a stopped corridor.

A Petition, a Partial Freeze, and a Date

The order came on a petition from the Mangaluru-based Aranya Parisara Mathu Havamana Badalavane Sangha.

Benedict Fernandes, its secretary, says the bar covers the project's full length. The tribunal returns to it on December 15.

Numbers Decide What Happens Next

GBA has logged more than 1,500 objections against the removal of 1,128 trees. The vegetation survey counted above 1,400 along the same stretch.

That gap is not arithmetic. It fixes:

- Compensatory planting liability
- Clearance sequencing
- Utility diversion
- The corridor's cost base

GBA invited objections on September 20 with a ten-day window and did not upload the species list.

The Transport Case Is Contested on Its Own Terms

The Indian Institute of Science's Sustainable Transportation Lab issued an August assessment: the tunnel shifts congestion to the veterinary college junction and Mekhri Circle rather than removing it, and costs roughly six times an equivalent metro.

It adds that the traffic model ignored capacity lost to flyover pier footprints.

Professor Archak Mittal of IIT Bombay backed the scheme through an Integrated Traffic Microsimulation Study. The IISc lab called that work biased.

Risk Allocation Is the Open Item

GBA owns the objections record and the approvals. The calendar belongs to the tribunal.

Whoever wins the corridor package inherits a clearance dependency that no tender document has yet framed as a compensable event.

What to Watch

Watch December 15. And watch whether GBA reissues the corridor works with tree clearance written in as a condition precedent, priced, and tied to time.

A bidder treating this as a standard road package is buying a schedule it does not control.

Across Bengaluru's pipeline of short urban tunnels, ecological clearance and modal cost comparison have become the binding constraints. Travel-time modelling no longer decides whether these projects get built.