Mumbai: Amid criticism, BMC expedites pothole repair works across city

Mumbai: Amid criticism, BMC expedites pothole repair works across city

A provision of Rs 2 crore each has been made to repair potholes across the city’s 24 wards.

SHEFALI PARAB-PANDITUpdated: Sunday, July 10, 2022, 07:56 AM IST
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Potholes disrupt vehicular movement in Mumbai | BL Soni

As several citizens flooded social media with their nightmarish experience of potholes, the BMC has formed a ward-wise team to address the menace on a war-footing.

A provision of Rs 2 crore each has been made to repair potholes across the city’s 24 wards. As part of the pre-monsoon works, the BMC has already distributed 2,422 metric tonnes of dry cold mix to all wards for repairing bad roads.

The ward is spending Rs 1.50 crore on precautionary measures and Rs 50 lakhs is being used for filling potholes. The roads under defect liability period are repaired by the concerned contractors at their cost, explained the civic official.

BMC additional commissioner (projects) P Velarasu has formed different teams on the ward-level to find potholes and get them filled by the contractors. The teams have been tasked to fill the potholes within 24 hours of receiving the complaint.

Elaborating on the anti-pothole measures, Velarasu said, “To make Mumbai pothole-free, we are constructing concrete roads. So with every passing year, the problem of potholes will minimise in the city. In the last five years, around 800 km of roads have been concretised, so we haven't found any complaints of potholes on these roads. All the roads up to 6 metres wide will be concretised.”

The BMC maintains around 2,055 km of roads in the city, of which 1,255 km is made up of asphalt and 800 km is concretised. Despite the civic body spending around Rs 1,000 crore annually on roads, there has always been an uproar over the poor quality of roads.

People's voice:

"When will Mumbai be pothole-free? The bad roads are a result of poor quality of materials being used for construction. Cold mix technology is a failure then why it’s being used to fill the potholes?" asks Ravi Raja, former opposition leader in BMC.

"Every year the same story of potholes haunts Mumbaikars. No third-party audit is being appointed to check the quality of road works. The road department is spending taxpayers crores of rupees and still, citizens suffer during the monsoon," says Bhalchandra Shirsat, BJP spokesman.

We have started a campaign of ‘Get well soon BMC Commissioner’ and will be sending 200 postcards to the civic body. "I have seen potholes being haphazardly filled by paver block. No levelling of the road is done, so even if the BMC claims to fill potholes within 24 hours, it reappears," says Godfrey Pimenta, founder of Watch Dog Foundation.

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