You may be having a tough time negotiating potholes on your way to the market but for now it’s — not the streets but — the footpaths that are being repaired.

Sidewalks being worked upon include main thoroughfares including the First Avenue that connects Salt Lake to Ultadanga, the Seventh Cross Road that leads from the Karunamoyee intersection to the Tank 8 Island as well as the roads inside several blocks of the township.

But the work has come as surprise to residents who feel that it’s the roads that are crying for repairs.

A CJ Block resident said that she was taken aback when several labourers started uprooting kerbstones in front of her house. According to Swati Choudhury, the stretch of pavement in front of her house had no broken stretches but the workers told her that the older kerbstones and paver blocks had to be removed as they would lay new ones in their place.

“I was taken shocked. They had dug up a perfect pavement just because they wanted to replace the paver blocks. When I told them that they should repair the innumerable ditches that dot the roads they said that they were there to just carry out pavement repairs,” said Choudhury.

A civic engineer said that pavement repairs would be carried out in AB, AC, CJ, and CK blocks. He said the tender for the pavement repairs had been called for before the pandemic struck and work started a few days back.

When asked why no road repairs were being carried out despite the rains leaving crater-ridden streets across the township, the engineer said that they had not called for the tenders of the road repairs yet.

Tapas Chatterjee, deputy mayor and the mayoral council member in charge of roads, said they had conducted a survey of the damaged roads in the township and would carry out patchwork repairs for the time being.

“The top layer of the roads has got washed away by the rains in several places. We are drawing up a list of the roads that need repairs and will make do with patchwork for the time being. Once the rains are over we will carry out extensive repairs,” said Chatterjee.

He also added that the pavement repairs were long overdue and that work had started in phases. “We will repair all roads and sidewalks before the pujas,” Chatterjee said.