Mumbai: Despite Rs 442 crore budget for repair, city roads in poor state

Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has utilised 41.45 per- centage (Rs.448.05 crore) of budget, almost half the budget money of Rs.1078.61 crore set for roads repair work up till September this year. Though BMC officials claim large money has been spent on roads repair work this time, still there are hundreds of roads in Mumbai which are in a bad condition and have to undergo repairing.

As per the report released by the officials from the BMC Public Relation department, the money spent is much higher than last year. As out of the previous year set budget of Rs 2886 crore for roads repair only 1.2 per cent (34.60 cr) was spent compared till September.

While BMC officials are busy patting their backs claiming more roads repair work has been done Vivekanand Gupta, a Mumbai based activist slammed the civic body and said statistical jugglery will not prove that the roads of Mumbai have improved. “In reality, the condition of roads is worse and still remains to be same. Also, how much expenditure has been done on each work should be clarified. Merely giving percentage of budget spend and comparing it with previous year is not satisfying.”

He also further alleged, “The quality of roads is the same as again tainted contractors have been given the work. The blacklisted contractors run companies with different names and unfortunately BMC has given work to them only. Also, the BMC has no committee to cross-check the history of these companies.”

On the contrary, before the monsoon BMC only managed to complete roads repair work of priority one, and from priority two it only managed to do 110 roads resurfacing work out of 938 roads.