Pune gets tech help on roads this monsoon

This year, the Pune Municipal Corporation wants to address complaints about bad roads.

This year, the Pune Municipal Corporation wants to address complaints about bad roads. For this, the civic body ensured that roads were repaired before the rain and even set up a monsoon helpline for citizens to register their complaints about potholes, waterlogging and choked drains. The PMC also gave the cellphone numbers of all 14 ward officers so that complaints could be sent through SMS.

The PMC promised to look into the complaints and address them within 24 hours. Now, to give this idea a big push, the civic body has roped in a group of young technocrats working for Better Roads Group, to monitor the operations of the helpline. The group will initiate immediate action on the complaints received through SMS.

“Members of the Better Roads Group would be forwarded a copy of each complaint regarding roads and time of completion of the work. These members will visit the site to ensure that the work is completed and would submit the report directly to municipal commissioner Pravinsinh Pardeshi,” sources in the PMC said on Monday.

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The idea is to reduce response time and keep an eye on the implementation of the system by the PMC staff. “It should not happen that citizens SMS their complaints and they are not attended to by the PMC staff,” said a top official.

“The Better Roads Group would facilitate the new system and ensure its effective implementation,” said development engineer (roads) Vivek Kharwadkar.

For the youth, it is their way of chipping in to improve the city. “All of us are from different companies. We have divided the ward offices among the members and will be monitoring the attendance of the complaints and submit a report to the municipal commissioner every week,” said group chief Youvraj Bagade, a software engineer working with Wipro Technologies.

Appaled by the condition of roads last year, the group decided to do something concrete, said Amit Kadam, who works for Persistent Technologies. The group had also filed a public interest litigation last year in the Bombay High Court on the bad condition of the city’s roads.