Arterial roads as well as streets in and around Salt Lake are getting worse by the day and are likely to remain so as there are no plans to relay them by the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation in the pipeline.
Not only are most main roads including Broadway that connects the township with EM Bypass, the First Avenue that leads to Ultadanga station from Salt Lake and the Second Cross Road riddled with giant potholes, there are places on these roads where the blacktop has caved in.
According to an official of the civic body’s road repairs and upkeep department, there are no plans afoot to completely relay these roads.
The corporation had failed to carry out even basic road repairs before the Durga Puja. On stretches where patchwork repairs were carried out the asphalt has worn away resulting in a mess of stone chips interspersed with huge craters that have turned driving or riding around Salt Lake a tricky affair.
Another official said that the only way to prevent more potholes and cave-ins was to completely scrape away the existing surface, add a layer of brick pieces and soil to reinforce it and then relay the stretches with asphalt.
Krishna Chakraborty, the chairperson of the board of administrators of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation, cited a severe shortage of funds for the erratic road repairs.
“We are getting a pittance in terms of property tax and are cash-strapped. I have asked the road contractors who had laid the roads to carry out patchwork repairs as part of the three-year maintenance contract. I have also set a deadline and work will start soon,” Chakraborty told The Telegraph on Monday.
A senior official of the state municipal affairs department, which allots funds to various municipal corporations and municipalities in the city, said that there was no fund crunch that would halt road repairs.
“Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation receives some funds directly from the state government as per recommendation of the state finance commission. If they run out of funds they can apply to us. We will arrange for funds so that they can start the road repairs,” said the official who did not want to be named.
A Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA) engineer said a road surface laid with mastic asphalt or concrete easily outlasts a surface redone with bitumen. Mastic asphalt could be laid in a short span of time and even in between rains.
But civic authorities keep choosing patchwork over other options.
Around Rs 4 crore is required to build a kilometre of mastic asphalt road. Though the cost is many times higher than patchwork repairs, it evens out in the long run because mastic asphalt doesn’t require frequent repairs.
An engineer said: “A concrete road is three times costlier to build compared to bitumen but lasts two decades. The longevity of a bitumen stretch, on the other hand, is a few months. A mastic asphalt road costs double and lasts around five years.”