Mumbai: Appreciating Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) move to set up a grievance redressal mechanism to enable citizens to lodge complaints about potholes, the Bombay High Court today asked the civic body to give a wide publicity to this measure. “No authority can dispute that there are large number of potholes in the city (Mumbai) and other districts of the state. There has been a failure on the part of the authorities to perform their duties. Now that a grievance redressal mechanism has been set up in compliance with our earlier orders, it is the responsibility of the authorities to give it a wide publicity,” a division bench of justices A S Oka and K R Shriram said.
BMC counsel A S Sakhre today informed the court that since June 1, when the redressal mechanism has been set up, 3,760 complaints were received, out of which, 3,265 complaints have been attended to and the concerned road has been repaired. “The website, in which citizens have to lodge their complaints, is easily accessible from Android phones. But Apple phone users cannot download it due to security reasons. We have written to Apple and requested them to permit the site,” Sakhre said.
“It is good that in such a short span of time so many complaints have been filed. All technical issues can be sorted out in due course of time,” Justice Oka said. The court has directed all the authorities to file an affidavit by September 10 stating what steps it has taken towards addressing the pothole issue, how many complaints they have received and the action taken thereafter.
The high court had taken suo moto (on its own) cognisance of the issue of potholes following a letter written by high court judge Gautam Patel. On May 20, the high court had observed that citizens have a fundamental right to good roads and that it is the state government’s statutory obligation to provide roads, which are free of potholes.
