Gurgaon: The newly inaugurated multi-level car parking facility in Sadar Bazar remains inoperable, with MCG officials saying that the project cannot be opened to the public because its operations and maintenance contract has not been awarded yet. The facility was inaugurated by Haryana CM Nayab Singh Saini over a month ago.
Officials said that while the tenders were floated twice, none of the applicants met the eligibility criteria required for selection. The eligibility varies from project to project.
The civic body is now considering relaxing these conditions to ensure that an agency can be hired to run the facility. For traders and visitors in the congested Sadar Bazar area, the delay means continued parking chaos despite the project being publicly presented as completed.
"We floated the tender twice. However, agencies are unable to fulfil the eligibility criteria, due to which this delay happened. We are now in talks with the consultant who prepared the request for proposal (RFP) to tweak certain conditions so that we can have an agency and the facility is made operational. It will take us at least one month more to make the parking functional," said a senior MCG official.
The project was originally scheduled to be completed in Dec 2021. The parking facility was constructed over 3,187 sq metres with three basements and six floors, and can accommodate 218 cars. Once operational, the Rs 55 crore project is expected to ease parking woes in one of the city's oldest and most crowded markets.
TOI reported on Oct 2, 2025 that MCG was planning to outsource the operations and maintenance of the facility for five years to ensure smoother management.
"What is the advantage of spending crores when the facility is not put to use? The building has been ready for six to seven months but is not operational. Once operational, it will resolve the parking problem of the area to a great extent," said Sumit Narang of Sadar Bazar Association.
A former Haryana govt official said that many of the projects often take years to complete and, in some cases, never even take off. "In the case of the multi-level car parking in Gurgaon, Rs 55 crore of taxpayers' money is already spent, yet the facility is still not operational.
Several projects across the state remain stuck in prolonged delays. If the carrying cost or interest burden on public funds locked into such stalled works was calculated, the figure would be substantial, underscoring what critics describe as a serious waste of public money," the official said, requesting anonymity.
The stalled parking facility is not an isolated case but part of a wider pattern across Haryana. Official data accessed by TOI shows that of the 737 projects announced by the CM since 2014, 148 are still unfinished.
This includes 72 classified as pending and 76 listed as in progress, putting the overall non-completion rate at about 20.1%. In other words, nearly one in five announced projects is yet to be delivered.
Panipat has the highest number of pending projects at 27, followed by Gurgaon with 20. Gurgaon also has 10 projects still in progress, while Panipat has seven underway. Faridabad, which has the highest number of CM announcements in the state at 144, currently has 23 projects in progress and eight pending.
Officials often attribute such delays to procedural hurdles such as tendering issues, technical requirements, or coordination challenges between departments. However, governance analysts point out that these are routine administrative steps that should typically be resolved before projects are declared ready or inaugurated.
The data also shows that of 737 CM announcements, 41 projects were "not found feasible to be executed". However, data on year-wise status of Haryana CM announcements shows that delays are increasingly concentrated in recent years. Of the 50 projects announced in 2025 alone, 37 are pending and 13 are in progress, meaning 100% of last year's announcements are yet to be completed. Similarly, in 2024, 19 out of 21 projects are pending and two are in progress, again leaving all of that year's announcements unfinished so far. Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with
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