It is difficult to know what drives his kind of ilk. Meet 45-year-old Bhaskar Prabhu, an activist who has filed nearly 100 applications under the RTI Act after the last year's floods.
It is difficult to know what drives his kind of ilk. Meet 45-year-old Bhaskar Prabhu, an activist who has filed nearly 100 applications under the Right To Information (RTI) Act after the last year's floods.
"I am not an expert. Even the civic officials are not as pathetic as the condition of our roads," he said in an interview to DNA on whether roads in Mumbai are ready to face the monsoon. Excerpts from the interview:
Tell us about your experience with the roads department?
It is one of the most corrupt departments. The information that I obtained clearly shows that before 26/7, the BMC did not fill city's potholes according to any specifications. Last year, in Ward A they filled 634 potholes with 449.83 metric tonnes of cold mixed (mixture of tar, sand and stones). Now, that comes to 709kg (1 mt = 1000kg) of mixed per pothole. You tell me, can they fill one pothole with 709kg of this mixture?
So are city roads prepared to face the monsoon?
Yet another disaster is just waiting to happen. The roads in the city are not safe because the BMC is not following the norms while repairing them. In one of the application, I had asked whether they were following any norms. The roads department wrote: "We don't follow norms during an emergency."
What are the specific problems with city roads now?
The new concrete curbstones used by the department are draining the exchequer since it is expensive to maintain. In several wards, the height of the pavements is more than the compound's plinth level of buildings and thus there is a threat of water rising in the houses. In many roads, there are no tree-guards (concrete slabs around trees).
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