The Indian Express                        25.03.2013

City roads may not be free of potholes this monsoon, too

Despite the civic administration’s claims of a pothole-free monsoon,
Mumbaikars will have to brace for bumpy rides during the rainy season.
BMC’s ambitious project of concretisation and asphalting of roads is yet
to take off due to issues over black-listed contractors and red-tape.

While only 30 per cent of road construction work in the western
suburbs has been completed so far, in island city, it is yet to begin,
and contracts in the eastern suburbs are yet to be allotted.

Though BMC had awarded road contracts worth over Rs 1,000 crore
for concretisation and asphalting in the city last year, it has delayed
the process for a range of reasons. Civic officials claim that it will
now have two months to undertake road construction work; concretisation
and asphalting of roads will stop during monsoon (from June until
November this year).

While work on south Mumbai roads was delayed following a strict
directive from Chief Minister to cancel contracts of blacklisted firms,
contracts for eastern suburbs have been delayed due to technical
reasons, said officials.

Major road repairs in south Mumbai were put on hold for over a
month by BMC, which was deliberating on whether to award a contract to a
firm that was under the scanner. Though the contract was finally
awarded to the same firm, work on these roads was yet to begin, said
officials.

RPS Infraprojects (formerly RP Shah), a company blacklisted by
the building proposals department in 2010, submitted the lowest bid for a
basket of projects estimated to cost Rs 275 crore for south Mumbai
roads. It bid with Prakash Engineering and Supreme Infra.

The contract was part of a Rs 530-crore bouquet of road repair and
construction projects in south Mumbai. This entails concretising and
asphalting over 65 km of roads in Churchgate, Fort, Marine Drive, Dadar,
Worli and other areas. Under this, 129 roads will be re-laid. Of these,
27 major ones will be concretised and 102 small and arterial ones will
be asphalted. The projects were to be awarded last year after a standard
tendering procedure.

“We are planning to expedite the repair process to ensure better
roads during monsoon. We still have two months before monsoon begins,”
said G M Agarwal, deputy chief engineer of BMC’s roads department.

In the eastern suburbs, the process to appoint contractors for
concretisation of 24 roads at a cost of around Rs 85 crore and
asphalting of 106 roads at cost of Rs 168 crore was yet to be completed,
said an official. “The delay is due to paper-work and bureaucratic
hurdles,” said a senior civic official.