If the municipal corporation is to be believed, 3,055 of the 3,090 potholes in the city have been fixed.
If the municipal corporation is to be believed, 3,055 of the 3,090 potholes in the city have been fixed.
“Of the Rs40-crore budget to fix potholes this year, we have spent around Rs24 crore to fill up 3,055 potholes — it takes Rs7,855 to fill up one pothole. The 35 remaining patches will be filled up shortly. These potholes had surfaced in the last one-and-a-half-months. The remaining money will be used during the Ganesh festival,” said a civic official, requesting anonymity.
As per the data collected by the BMC, 1,805 potholes have been filled up in the western suburbs, 712 in the island city and 538 in the eastern suburbs.
Most of the potholes were found on roads in Andheri, Versova and Borivli. Civic officials blamed infrastructure projects couple with heavy traffic for the potholes.
In his budget speech this year, municipal commissioner Subodh Kumar had promised that there will be no potholes on the roads this monsoon. He had also unveiled a new strategy to identify dot-holes before they become potholes and a separate engineers' team was set up to execute the plan.
“This year, we have attended to the potholes early so that there will be less trouble for motorists. When we try to fix potholes during the monsoon, the material filled in the patch gets washed away by the rains. We hope that there will be fewer potholes this year, thanks to our pre-monsoon work,” said a civic official, requesting anonymity. In 2009-10, the BMC spent Rs100 crore to fill potholes — even after the 2005 deluge, the BMC had not spent so much money on the work.
Congress corporator Rajendraprasad Chaube alleged that road contractors often submit bogus bills to make money.
“It has been observed that if the contractor has undertaken work of Rs25 lakh, he will submit bills of Rs50 lakh, depending on his clout in the civic administration and political circle. Every one is part of this. They raise objections on increasing the budget for pothole-filling, but do not expose the scam,” Chaube claimed.su
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