Despite dry spell,BMC struggles to fill potholes

“If the BMC is claiming that it attends to most of the potholes,then how come an equal number of potholes come up every week. This implies either the civic body is not able to repair the potholes or is doing a shoddy job,” said Rahul Shewale,Standing Committee chairman and Shiv Sena corporator.

According to Chief Engineer Road Traffic and Bridges Satish Badve,“Though we are repairing potholes every week,our officials detect new locations in their daily surveys.” Another official said,“The civic body has two officials in each ward who check at least five roads every day,covering 50-70 roads in a ward every week. There are chances that new potholes develop on the same roads or they get damaged after every repair.”

The work of repairing potholes during monsoon is handled by the maintenance department of each ward which hires a private agency. The agency is required to attend to potholes within 48 hours.

While the civic body has been spending crores for road repairs and technology,corporators said nothing much has come out of it. The civic body was supposed to use the jet patching machines this year after they were lying idle for the past two years. But citing technical problems,the machines were not used this year too.

This year,the BMC had appointed 23 private contractors to attend to potholes and bad patches. It has already disbursed Rs 30.5 crore to them. Besides,a proposal has been submitted to the civic chief to allocate additional Rs 6 crore. Shewale said,“The central agency leaves it to each ward to repair potholes. The wards in turn give the work to private contractors. I have proposed to form a special cell which should be made responsible for surveying and keeping a check on road repair work.”

Renaming roads tops civic body meeting agenda

While the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is under fire for the poor condition of roads,corporators seem to have other items on their agenda. In a general body meeting on Wednesday,corporators passed 43 proposals of renaming roads and chowks across the city,of which 42 were passed under the ‘urgent business’ category. In what seems like a run-up to the upcoming civic polls scheduled for early 2012,most proposals in the house meeting have been about renaming roads and chowks after former politicians,social workers etc. A performance assessment of the city’s corporators carried out by the Praja foundation last year on the basis of RTI applications filed between January 2008 and November 2009,revealed renaming of roads attracted the largest number of questions. According to the assessment,one fifth of the questions asked by corporators were related to renaming of roads and chowks. Of the 1,382 questions asked by corporators in ward committee meetings,258 were on renaming roads. But the highest number of civic complaints filed by citizens was about bad roads. More than 74,800 complaints were filed related to bad roads. BJP leader and corporator in the BMC Ashish Shelar said instead of focusing on the quality of road works and repairs,corporators were giving undue importance to trivial matters.