Roads in the island city continue to cave in every few months — last week’s Peddar Road collapse was the seventh in two years — but the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has scrapped a crucial plan to procure Ground Penetrating Radars (GPR) to identify leakages in utilities without actually digging up roads.

Now, civic officials say that unless South Mumbai’s 2,500-km underground water pipeline network along with storm water drains and sewers, all laid in the British era, are replaced, roads will continue to collapse.

Also, the BMC has not conducted the proposed survey of Raja Ram Mohan Roy Road at Prathna Samaj, Veer Nariman Road and Peddar Road, parts of which have sunk over the last year.

Following the collapse last year of a portion of Sane Guruji Marg near Jacob Circle, where three persons died, the civic administration had announced a plan to buy six GPR machines at Rs 60 lakh each. Road cavities are a major problem in the island city, particularly the Colaba-to-Mahim stretch with its reclaimed land and leakage-prone utilities dating back to the British era. Leakages lead to the top soil washing off, soil erosion and cavities on the road surface.

Senior civic officials said that the plan had remained on paper. “We have cancelled the plan to procure the machines. VJTI professors were given the task of surveying the leakages through GPR machines but there were no results,” said additional municipal commissioner (projects) Anil Diggikar.

BMC had appointed VJTI professor S Bodas who had developed a GPR machine to study the Jacob Circle collapse. However, he was unable to find the reasons for the leakage as traffic was not diverted to move the machine and the road was not cleaned of debris either.

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