Sorry, can稚 afford to fix roads, admits civic body……..Stuti Shukla
The day ahead of Ganesh immersion processions, the BMC admitted most of the road construction work that were to be undertaken in the past ten months have been put for lack of of funds. As many as 47 tenders issued in November for cement concrete and asphalt roads have been withdrawn as the BMC cannot afford to pay contractors, who on their part have refused to take up new work.
The BMC has received 744 complaints from citizens on bad patches and potholed roads between June 1 and September 15. Of these, 271 were in August alone, when the city received the most rainfall for this season.
An allocation of Rs 1,200 crore had been made in the current budget for 100 km of asphalt roads and 50 km of cement concrete roads. Chief engineer of the civic roads department Arun Ralkar said owing to cost escalations and subsequent variations in the original estimates for road projects undertaken in the previous year, not much is left for undertaking new projects this year.
泥espite the allocation of this money, most of it has got used up for last year痴 project as huge cost variations occurred. The best we can do this year is repair potholes, new roads will have to wait,� said Ralkar.
The total length of roads in Mumbai is approximately 2,000 km of which the BMC has managed to concrete 500 km since 1983. About 200 km of this has been carried out in the past three years.
Since rebuilding a road with cement-concrete is the only long term solution to avoiding potholes, as admitted by civic officials, the civic body wants to systematically concrete all the remaining 1,500 km long stretches. Concreting 1 kilometre of road at present costs Rs 20 lakh and the civic body will effectively need Rs 30, 000 crore for all roads in the city. 鏑ooking at the current financial situation, it is not difficult to observe that total concretisation seems distant,� said Ralkar.