BMC imposes Rs 75 lakh on contractor, agency for poor quality of work; suspends assistant engineer for negligence

BMC’s move came following a delegation of officers led by Abhijit Bangar, Additional Municipal Commissioner (Projects), carried out an inspection of the ongoing works on April 7 at Bandra’s 34th road.

During his inspection, Bangar found out that the concrete layer that was used for the road works was substandard.

Besides this, Bangar also found out that the surface of the newly completed road was uneven, and surface irregularities were observed as well.

Following this, authorities issued a notice to the agencies and also sought an explanation from their engineer, whose responsibility was to observe the ongoing works.

The officials said those issued notices were given time to reply, which came earlier this week, and since the explanation that was given by them appeared unsatisfactory, actions were taken against them.

“In their reply, they admitted that only a three-day window was given for the concrete to get cured instead of seven days. They also admitted that the field dry density (FDD) test was not carried out by them to ascertain the required strength of the concrete. Therefore, by taking these issues into cognisance penalty was levied on them since these were not an unintentional mistake but deliberate wrongdoing,” Bangar said.

This is the second time in the past three weeks that BMC has imposed penalties on contractors for shoddy road work.

On April 16, the authorities imposed a Rs 20 lakh penalty each on two contractors for using poor-quality concrete for the ongoing works after officials found out that the concrete that is being used for road concretisation works was not up to the mark.

Out of Mumbai’s 2,050 km of roads, more than 500 km have been dug up for the ongoing work.

The civic administration has set up a May 31 deadline for filling the already dug-up roads to ensure that all the roads that have been taken up for concreting are completed before the monsoon season.