BMC asks traffic cops to shut roads for pothole repair work

In the civic Standing Committee meeting on Wednesday,corporators lashed out at the BMC for repeated appearance of potholes on the city roads. Congress corporator Sameer Desai said instead of blaming heavy rains,BMC should focus on using effective technology. “Rain is not the only culprit behind bad roads. We have spoken about so many new technologies in the past few years,but have failed to implement any. We purchased expensive road rollers but they are not being used,” he said.

BJP corporator Ashish Shelar said the BMC was not doing enough to use the expensive jet-patching machines and not adopting the carbon-core technology despite its benefits. “There has been a lot of talk about acquiring new technologies,but when it comes to actual work BMC uses the same old methods,” said Shelar.

Additional Municipal Commissioner Aseem Gupta said a meeting will be convened on August 9 where all the new technologies will be reconsidered. “We have explored and tried many new methods such as the carboncore,wonder patch etc. We are taking a re-look at these to ascertain if any of these can prove beneficial in the current scenario,” said Gupta. He added that traffic police have agreed to the request to close one lane of the road for four hours in the afternoon. “Closing an entire road to traffic is very difficult in this city. However,traffic police has said that it will identify roads on which one of the two lanes can be closed,” he said.

Standing Committee Chairman Rahul Shewale said a deposit of Rs 50 crore from various road contractors is currently with the BMC and deposits of erring contractors will be forfeited.