The Sunken Road in this story is the Vikas Marg. The details of the story are from memory. I think it was in 1996 that one side of the road started sinking. Traffic coming from a busy intersection had to stop and navigate around the sinking portions, choking the intersection. There was a bus-stop just after the intersection, so although buses would no longer stop in the middle of the road, there would be a to do when they'd have to pull from lane 1 to lane 3. As the first week went by and then the second, I grew angry at how long the repair was taking. The weeks grew into months. Then in 1997, conscientious municipal workers put a few barricades across half of one side of the road. So for these 100 meters or so, three lanes of traffic were squeezed into one and a half lanes. In 1998, they broke up the road surface in that section over a few days and put up a wire fence around it, put up signs saying "water leak", then left it undisturbed. Shrubs began to grow over the soil. 1999 came and went. The signs had faded. All this while at least half a million people impossibly squeezed past the section each day. Then came 2000. The municipality at last swung into action. For six months, they totally sealed off one direction on the road, diverting traffic to a single small feeder lane by its side. Traffic over the feeder lane never exceeded speeds of 5 kmph, since it was broken with the mud and water from the nearby repair work. People took to driving the wrong way on the other side of the road, sometimes the police stopped them, usually the cops did not bother. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, when you passed the section, you'd not see even one person working. 

Then around August 2000, it was all finished! It had just taken four years!

Incidentally, the Vikas Marg was also the scene of perhaps the most hilarious road signs I have ever seen. The Vikas Marg culminates over a bridge across the Yamuma, better known as the ITO bridge. Sometime in the early 1990s, parts of the bridge railing began to break off and fall into the river! At first no one cared. When the holes in the railing became big enough for the odd scooter to fall through, the concerned authorities placed some bricks (I mean placed, not as in building a wall) around the area. Later, when the gaps got very large, they built square brick walls around each of the gaps and put up signs saying: "Please do not walk on the pavement. It could fall into the river." Those square brick walls remained for years.