6,244km of roads to be dug up in Ahmedabad

AHMEDABAD: When the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), assured the HC on Friday that its roads and buildings department will ensure that no newly laid or resurfaced roads will be dug by Road Opening (RO) or utility service agencies, the civic body should have taken a peek into its own records.

Here is the inevitable truth. Between September this year and July 2022, road opening agencies — which includes municipal, state, central government, semi-government and private utility providers put together — are to dig 25,315 road stretches which accumulates into 6,244km of roads. This translates to digging city roads 2.5 times over considering that the official municipal road length of Ahmedabad is 2,580km !
This does not end there. In 10 months from now, these agencies together will bore 3 lakh pits into city roads for installation of underground junctions for civic utility pipelines and cable networks.
The individual utility companies will dig anywhere between as small as 10.46km to 3,274km of road length.
But how much does the AMC pay towards road repairs if the utility company does a shoddy work, and this also allows the road contractor to be off the defect liability period for that particular road stretch?
“It is the AMC and not the road contractor, which ends up paying towards the road repairs if the utility company does a poor road repair work after digging,” claims a senior AMC official.
To give a perspective, the AMC will spend at the rate of Rs 1,385 per square metre for filling potholes of minimum 75mm depth.
This year alone the AMC has coughed up approximately Rs 176 crore for road repairs and repaired 25,623 potholes, of which 4,333 potholes were in western part of the city.