ANALYSIS
What no one seems to realize is that the BMC can keep increasing its potholes budget every year, but it is only treating the symptom, not the cause.
Freshers in journalism (reporting) usually start their career with a general, not-so-important, beat. But when I started out in this city of dreams, I was lucky enough to be given the beat of Asia’s richest civic body — Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). I was thrilled. I was very happy to turn up at the grand Gothic structure of the BMC headquarters near CST every day. At the time, I didn’t know that this rich civic body would fail to deliver a key promise — pothole-free roads for Mumbaikars.
One of my first reports was on potholes. I still remember it was on the Opposition slamming the Sena-BJP that controlled the BMC even then, for the pathetic condition of the roads. Over the years, the BMC has increased its ‘potholes budget’ from just Rs 14 crore to almost Rs 100 crore but the state of roads hasn’t changed. In fact, they have worsened, giving motorists back problems and causing frequent accidents.
It is especially bad during the monsoon, not only because roads deteriorate faster because of water logging, but because motorists cannot fathom the depth and size of the rainwater-filled craters. Motorists bounce along on the rough surface, getting torturous body pain at the end of the day. Sometimes people get seriously injured. If the pothole is huge and there is heavy traffic, people can also die in accidents caused by potholes.
Who is responsible for this?
Politicians and civic officials would like us to believe that motorists themselves are responsible for the act. What no one seems to realize is that the BMC can keep increasing its potholes budget every year, but it is only treating the symptom, not the cause. One of the major reasons for potholes is water logging. This is bound to happen in Mumbai since our storm water drainage system is over 100 years old. The sewers that take the excess rainwater into the sea were built by the British and have probably narrowed down and blocked with debris now. This is why when it rains heavily, water takes time to drain out. This causes water logging that eats up the surface of roads, especially if they are badly made.
So, just repairing potholes each year will not solve the problem. The storm water drainage system needs to be upgraded and heavy traffic flow need to be controlled. Unless these basic issues are resolved, the BMC can spend its entire annual budget of Rs26,000 crore on potholes (and some contractors and civic officials will be very happy with that) but the city still won’t have smooth roads.
The Sena-BJP combine that has ruled the BMC for the last 15 years with the promise of pothole-free roads should be ashamed. The UPA II may be known for its various scams, but the Sena-BJP is no less ‘corrupt’ for being absolutely unable to ensure the city has smooth roads after pouring so much money into them.
Interestingly, to tone down the frequency of the word ‘pothole’, the BMC officially started calling them ‘bad-patches’. It even objected to attempts to count potholes because that helps the common man calculate how much money has been spent on each one. The figure always come Rs 7,000 to Rs 10,000 per pothole. That’s a huge figure given the number of potholes in the city.
In the last 10 years, lakhs have been spent to bring almost 10 foreign road repair technologies/methods to the city too, but not a single one succeeded. Perhaps it’s now time to rename Mumbai from the ‘City of Dreams’ to the more apt name, the ‘City of Potholes’.
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