BMC gets 48 hr deadline to fill potholes

Realising that it cannot continue to ignore public outcry over the sorry state of Mumbai’s roads, the state government on August 4 ordered agencies responsible to fill all potholes within 48 hours. The government is also thinking of long-term solutions and is planning to change the way road contracts are assigned.
“It’s sad that the chief minister has had to intervene to ensure the municipal corporation does its basic work. He is contemplating a systemic change in the way road contracts are given. He also wants to pin the responsibility of the state of the roads on civic officials in charge of them,” said a senior official from the Chief Minister’s Office. “The CM is likely to get experts to conduct a road audit.”
CM Prithviraj Chavan is likely to ask civic chief Subodh Kumar to get involved and take action — charge penalties — against contractors behind the bad work, the official said.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) and the state public works department will now have to perform the miraculous task of making the city pothole-free within 48 hours.
Meeting the deadline is near impossible as to fill potholes it needs to stop raining. The BMC also does not have the capacity to produce and transport hot-mix asphalt to fill all the potholes within 48 hours.
Besides, laying roads with asphalt will need those stretches to be blocked off for several hours. There are 694 pothole locations on 1,900 km of civic roads and all of them cannot be cordoned off without precipitating a traffic problem.