Chandigarh Municipal Corporation (File)The Chandigarh Municipal Corporation has asked Punjab Engineering College (PEC) to submit a proposal on maintaining quality checks of roads in the city. Earlier, the MC had asked NITTTR to submit a proposal on the same, as the civic body is preparing to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with an entity to monitor the work of road construction in the city, for the next 30 years.
After facing criticism for constructing ‘bad’ roads in the city, the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation had decided to sign an MoU with an entity for 30 years to ensure that the quality of the road recarpeting work is not compromised with, by the civic engineers. Following the signing of MoU, no road work will be undertaken before the go-ahead by the entity and the standards of the work will be open for inspection at all times.
Municipal Corporation commissioner KK Yadav said, they are waiting for the proposal from PEC, following which a decision on signing an MoU with the college will be taken. “We have already got a detailed proposal from NITTTR. Once we get from PEC, we will decide about it,” he said.
Besides coming up with long term solutions to ensure longer life of the roads and inspecting whether the construction specifications are followed, the entity will also maintain records of each road, entailing details about materials used in its construction and repair.
Till now, there are no historical data on roads with the road divisions, to know about the material which were used for its construction. However, under the current initiative, the road history will be with the entity and a copy of the same will be provided to the MC’s building and roads wing.
In a series of stories in August, Chandigarh Newsline had highlighted that a whooping sum of Rs 50.73 crore, which was spent on road recarpeting, had gone into the pits. Newsline had visited recarpeted roads with a former chief engineer to uncover the defects in the construction of the roads.
The Municipal Corporation manages 80 per cent of the roads (V3, V4, V5, V6, parking roads, village roads, phirni roads) in the city and administration looks after V1 and V2 roads.
