Fiscal year about to end, AMC yet to finish roadworks

It seems the year-end is not propelling the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) to expedite its pace of roadworks, mainly road resurfacing, to meet the March 31 deadline.

There is a clutch of works pending with the city’s road department for the financial year 2017-18. And in the final two weeks of this fiscal, it will be impossible for the authority to accomplish what was meant to be finished over the whole year.

As the civic body’s standing committee chairman, Pravin Patel, took stock of the pending road works on Thursday, he was handed a list of pending works by the engineering department.

“All the zones have pending work for the current fiscal. As per the budget estimate, some work is yet to complete. As per target, each zone has some thousand metric tonnes of bitumen work which is yet to  be finished,” said Patel. “Collectively in all the zones, more than one lakh metric tonnes worth of bitumen work is yet to be finished,” he added.

Commenting on the inefficiency of the civic body, Leader of Opposition Dinesh Sharma said, “The people are fretting over damaged roads. And in spite of having budgetary allocations, the lazy and lethargic BJP-run AMC is not acting to provide basic amenities to the citizens.”

The budget for the roadworks was around Rs 100 crore but after heavy rains damaged the roads, the budget was revised upwards.

Civic standing committee chairman Patel claimed he was not informed by the engineers in time.