The condition of the roads is one of the major issues that were raised at an interaction of CE Block residents with civic chairperson Sabyasachi Dutta who is the local councillor. Several lanes have cratered paths that are getting in worse shape with the monsoon showers.
"The roads of Salt Lake are dilapidated. The other day, at the board (of councillors) meeting, I jokingly said that one need not buy stone chips when building a house in the township. If one sweeps the broken roads there will easily be a truckload of chips that one can gather,” Dutta said candidly.
He promised to repair two major roads by the end of the year - the main road in between BE-CE blocks and the road in front of Arunachal Bhavan.
Eye on sweepers
He also came up with a suggestion to improve the block's cleanliness.
“Nominate four residents who would be available for the job on each side of the block. They would supervise the sweeping and sign in an exercise book. The sweepers will get paid only if they can produce these signatures. But the nominees have to check the rest of the lanes and not just in front of their own houses,” Dutta said.
Stonechips heaped on the road in front of a construction site blocking part of the carriageway.
Seated between KMDA director-general Supriyo Maiti and Hidco managing director Debashis Sen, the latter being the block association president, he pointed out that he did not believe in patchwork repairs, which was a suggestion from one of the residents present.
“It is an eyewash. The biggest enemy of bitumen is water. There are two reasons why the top layers come off. If there is water seepage underneath due to a crack in the pipeline, the sand below starts shifting and the road subsides. This has happened near Tank 5, at the BJ-CJ Block interaction near the mayor's house and at the corner of Bijan Bhavan in Sector III.”
The cratered entry to CE Block
The other reason is the accumulation of water in the kerb channel. “Unless one goes for thorough repair by scraping off the top layer first, the height of the road rises above the plinth level of the houses. So water will accumulate at the sides from where the bitumen will begin to wear off.”
He promised to replace a missing gully pit cover between CE6 and 7, where a lady and a dog have been victims of accidents.
The roads in Sector I, till AF Block, date back to the late 60s and early 70s, he said. Roads of Salt Lake have multiple owners. The ownership includes departments like urban development, forest and irrigation and the KMDA.
“They do not maintain their roads. There is lack of persuasion from the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation's side also. But the Corporation cannot maintain all the roads out of its own resources,” he said. He also thanked Sen for getting funds cleared for the maintenance of the Green Verge, which is divided into CE, BE Blocks and two parts of AE Block. “The allocation by the urban development department is close to Rs 1 crore. There have been several meetings with the KMDA which is executing the project,” Dutta said.
A problem rampant in almost all the blocks also came up — parking. “People have built palatial houses but not kept space to garage multiple cars,” complained one. Dutta pointed to a new rule that mandates keeping the ground floor for parking if the plot is over 4.25 cottahs.
A house owner of the block was accused of turning the parking space on the ground floor into a hall and parking his luxury cars on the road, reducing its carriageway. He suggested a meeting with the police, where the attending traffic wing representatives would sort out parking issues. The same was the consequence of construction materials being stashed on the roads.
“A 14-wheeler truck dumps stone chips, blocking even my driveway entry, for construction on the next plot,” a resident complained. “There is no law in the municipal act to stop this. The only solution could be agitation at the site by residents,” Dutta responded.
But no solution was offered to a resident who complained of branches of a tall tree planted by a neighbour intruding into his house. “If our tree cutter cannot access your house, it cannot be helped. We get requests to trim the topmost branches but we cannot ask workers to climb trees to do the chopping manually. What if they fall?” he argued.
As for the field adjacent to the community hall, unkempt with elephant grass, he promised to clear the ground within a week.