The Noida Authority has closed the Noida Elevated Road carriageway running from Sector 61 towards Sector 18 after a section of the road surface near the ISKCON temple in Sector 33 gave way, the second such failure on the ₹480-crore corridor in a little over a month. Repairs began on Wednesday, and officials said they hope to reopen the stretch within about two days.
A small hole that kept growing
According to officials, a passer-by reported the damage on Monday morning. The patch, roughly two feet by two feet, was first fenced off with barricades while traffic squeezed past on a single lane. By Wednesday the hole had widened, and the authority shut the entire carriageway in that direction so engineers could work on it.
Local reports said the spot had already been patched once before the surface broke open again, with steel reinforcement visible underneath. On Wednesday morning, before the full closure, vehicles queued for several kilometres from Sector 61 towards the temple as drivers funnelled past the barricades.
Diversions in place
The Noida traffic police said vehicles coming from the Sector 61 side are being sent down to Maharaja Agrasen Marg, which runs below and alongside the elevated road, and then towards Gijhor and the Sector 31 and Sector 25 side to reach Sector 18. Traffic to sectors along the route can move as usual, emergency vehicles face no restrictions, and the carriageway from Sector 18 towards Sector 61 remains open.
We are also probing to ascertain the reason for this cave-in and if this is linked to the previous incident.
Vandana Tripathi, Additional CEO, Noida Authority
Second failure since September
On September 15, a much larger section, about 10 feet by 5 feet and around three feet deep, caved in near Vishwa Bharti Public School on the same Sector 61 to Sector 18 side. The authority is now examining whether the two failures share a cause.
The 4.8-km, six-lane road, opened to the public in 2017, links Sector 18 with Sectors 60, 61 and 62 and forms a key route between Noida, Ghaziabad, Greater Noida West and Delhi via the DND Flyway. Traffic department data puts weekday use at nearly 1.5 lakh commuters. In March 2024, the authority spent ₹14.55 crore on repairs after cracks appeared and surface layers eroded at several points.
What happens next
Officials have said they plan to bring in IIT Delhi to carry out a safety audit of the whole structure. Separate reports said engineers from IIT Roorkee and the Uttar Pradesh State Bridge Corporation will test the road surface, the concrete and the steel structure beneath to find out whether the problem is limited to the top layers or reaches the main structure. Further repairs will depend on those findings.
The repeated failures come as the authority prepares a detailed project report, being drawn up by IIT Roorkee, for a separate six-lane elevated road of about 5.5 km from the Rajnigandha underpass in Sector 3 to Sector 60, estimated at around ₹850 crore. Commuters can call the traffic helpline on 9971009001 for updates on the closure.
