No more digging to repair faults: CC roads to have cross-ducts for utility cables

Utility lines comprise of telephone and power cables, optical fibres, water and gas supply pipes. These lines usually pass through hume pipes, which are laid beneath the road surfaces. Therefore, whenever there is a fault in any of these utilities, the entire road surface had to be excavated in order to repair the fault.

The BMC in its new trenching policy has mentioned that instead of running the utility lines through pipes, dedicated utility boxes will be created by the side of roads, which will not require digging to repair faults.

“These ducts will be created on all the roads of Mumbai that have been take up for concretisation. Eventually, all the 2,050 km stretch of roads will be concretised, which means each and every road will have these rectangular ducts in the future,” P Velrasu, additional municipal commissioner (Projects), told The Indian Express on Friday.

The BMC’s policy guidelines state that roads having a minimum width of 40 metres will have sidestrips upto 1.5 metres wide earmarked for creating these concrete ducts.

“All water service connections and pipes should be replaced along with road improvement work. All utility service provider agencies should also lay separate additional cables on these ducts to ensure the future course of demand is met,” the policy document states.

“All water service connections and pipes should also be replaced at the time when improvement works for roads are carried out to avoid any additional excavation in future,” the document states.

Civic officials said these ducts will be equipped with lid-like covers through which one can easily access the cables or utility lines during damage, which eventually will not require digging of the road surface.

The BMC at present has taken up concretisation of 397 km of roads in Mumbai at a cost of Rs 6,000 crore. Mumbai has a total road network of 2,050 km that falls under the civic body.