A mixture of lousy tar & bitumen spells potholes of money

Every time you travel on city roads, you curse the BMC for the innumerable potholes. But the BMC in cahoots with contractors choose patch-work over laying new roads as this keeps the bribe money flowing into everyone’s pockets.

Speaking to contractors, DNA found they eagerly wait for monsoon as shoddy work reaps huge profits. “Filling up a pothole is a money-making business,” a contractor said. “No one keeps a count on the number of potholes… it means almost unlimited money exchanging hands while bagging contracts for repairing roads.”

The patchwork starts with filling up a pothole with a cold mix of gravel and metal. But this gets washed away within 36 hours, he said.“When levelling and laying of asphalt is not done during summers or when rain stops, potholes reappear.”

Also, the BMC seems to have no clear policy on roads. Some stretches have asphalt, some are concretised and some even have paver-block tiles.   

The tendering process does not include any bank guarantees from contractors bagging the contract. All these are done basically to keep the cycle going — pothole, tender, patchwork and again pothole, the contractor said.

The bribes are missing from the series because no one wants to talk about it but it exists and without it nothing would move, he said.

Sanjay Bafna, who has been involved in building roads under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, chose to come on record and explain why potholes keep reappearing every time it starts raining.

“Roads will have potholes when the top layer is not been done properly,” he said.

“A road laid with asphalt can last easily five years if good quality bitumen or coal tar is used. But it rarely happens… the bitumen in most cases is of poor quality. Even if the civic bosses want to pull up contractors for their shoddy job, they can do little as these contractors have political backing.”