Maharashtra’s new Rs 1,300 crore plan to make roads pothole-free

“This is a complete shift from the sporadic repair contracts that were being awarded previously. It will enhance accountability and ensure road quality throughout the year,” said Ashish Kumar Singh, Principal Secretary, Public Works Department.

Singh said that his department had already floated tenders to award the maintenance contracts.

Each such contract would involve a road length of 10 kilometres and would be valid for a two-year period.

According to the government’s estimates, the contract would cost Rs 1,300 crore in all. But it is banking on handsome savings on the recurrent expenditure on pothole repairs, besides the economic benefits from a more dependable road infrastructure network.

For more accountability in the repair work, the government has imposed a condition that those who are awarded the maintenance contracts would have to compulsorily use mechanised methods to fix bad patches. Contractors will also be required to upload real time photos of potholes and bad patches being repaired.

Senior sources said that the earlier practice had been to award repair contracts for individual bad patches, which made monitoring the repair work challenging.

Under the new plan, the number of contracts will be fewer, making the monitoring process more manageable, one of them added.

The whole idea is to make roads pothole-free and more durable, said another.

Meanwhile, the department is in the process of awarding construction of another 10,000 kilometre of roads, totalling Rs 30,000 crore, under the hybrid annuity model.

The department has proposed to pay 40 per cent of the cost of such contracts in biannual instalments within two years of completion of the work, while the remaining payments would be made in phases over 15 years.