KOLKATA: The IPL match at Eden Gardens slowed down the speed of the East-West Metro tunnelling on Wednesday, pushing back the work schedule by a day. The speed is slated to pick up after midnight, once the crowd disperses from near the site in central Kolkata.The project stretch—S N Banerjee Road—being close to Eden and apprehensive of traffic chaos and the surge of viewers in the area before and after the IPL match in the evening, the police asked Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation (KMRC), implementing the Metro project, to slow down work. As a result, tunnel boring machine (TBM) Chandi, currently stationed around 10m from S N Banerjee Road , will start building the west-bound tunnel below the road on Friday, instead of Thursday.TBM Chandi has been at the Jawaharlal Nehru crossing for the past one month, during which its backup parts were assembled some 25m below the ground. It was recommissioned on Tuesday and was due to reach S N Banerjee Road on Thursday.As tunnelling causes huge ground settlement, stretches of the pavement along S N Banerjee Road has to be barricaded as a precaution. Initially, the first 100m of the western-side footpath was supposed to be blocked for the next four days to let TBM Chandi pass below the stretch. Before allowing the barricading of a portion of the footpath, the south traffic guard, which holds the jurisdiction of S N Banerjee Road, conducted a joint inspection with the Metro authorities on Tuesday. The ground survey later, officers at Lalbazar requested the KMRC to slow down tunnelling for a day so that the barricading could be deferred by a day. “We realized that blocking the stretch of the pavement at the SN Banerjee Road-JL Nehru Road crossing would become a major challenge while directing IPL fans from Esplanade towards the stadium,” a traffic officer said.“When we contacted CAB, we realized it was going to be a packed stadium on Wednesday,” another officer said. The match started around 8pm, when traffic was relatively thin. But with ticket demands being high after Andre Russel’s unlikely victory, the crowds, especially those coming from Sealdah station, started trickling in from around 6.30pm, the peak evening rush hour. Had the pavement been kept blocked in the evening, it would have been difficult for us to manage the crowds headed for Eden in the evening, a traffic officer said.The match is supposed to end at 11.20pm and KMRC officials have been allowed to barricade after midnight.The next IPL match is on April 12. By then, TBM Chandi is supposed to have covered 200m till Regal Cinema. “We may have to review the situation ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Brigade Rally on April 3,” a traffic officer said.TBM Chandi, along with TBM Urvi, has been lowered below the ground to burrow a Esplanade-Sealdah tunnel of East-West Metro. This is the last leg of tunnelling of the 16km Howrah-Sector V link, covering S N Banerjee Road, Nirmal Chandra Street and B B Ganguly Street.

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