The road where a Class IX student died on Wednesday after he was hit on his head by the arm of a payloader has been under repairs since 2017.

Bansdroni’s Dinesh Nagar Road is still being repaired and is still in a state of extreme disrepair.

In 2017, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation initiated a project to upgrade the drainage and sewage of areas covered by four wards — from 111 and 114 — in the city’s southern suburbs under the Kolkata Environmental Improvement Investment Program (KEIIP).

What unfolded through Wednesday at Dinesh Nagar after a payloader crushed Soumyo Sil, 15, to death around 7am, was an outpouring of people’s anger against administrative callousness.

The road connects Renia in Ward 35 of the Rajpur-Sonarpur municipality and Dinesh Nagar under KMC’s Ward 113, where the KEIIP programme has been going on since 2017 with funds from the Asian Development Bank.

The thoroughfare is the only one that allows thousands of residents to access parts of the city covered by the KMC, senior officials of the civic body said.

Since 2017, this road and several others in Bansdroni have been dug up to lay underground pipes.

Senior officials overseeing the work said the scope of the ₹1200-crore project was to develop a system that would drain water from the four KMC wards and wards 35 and 36 of the Rajpur-Sonarpur municipality to Keorapukur, west of Tolly’s Nullah.

“The consultant engaged for the job erred in deciding to lay big pipes of 1,200mm diameter under all roads — small, medium and big — across the project area. As a result, several roads, including the relatively narrower Dinesh Nagar Road, had to be dug up completely,” said a senior KMC official.

Within two years of the work starting, the project was hit by multiple delays including the peak Covid phase between March 2020 and October 2021.

With drains lying uncovered and roads dug up, residents struggled to cross the stretches during monsoon for years. A section of the residents alleged that some fell into the open drains and injured themselves, some others suffered fractures.

The delay in the project’s execution prompted mayor Firhad Hakim to convene several meetings and instruct officials to speed up the work, several KMC officials said. But that did not have much effect.

Senior officials said just about 55 per cent of the total work was complete, even after Hakim threatened to blacklist the contractors on the job.

“The delay in the execution of the work coupled with the student’s death infuriated a section of the residents and resulted in an outpouring of anger,” said Tarakeswar Chakraborty, chairman of borough 11, covering the wards under KMC.

In the face of frequent appeals by the residents, the KMC decided to do patchwork repairs of the Dinesh Nagar Road road in Bansdroni ahead of Durga Puja.

Engineers decided the road would be repaired with crushed bricks and layers of sand and part of the existing broken bituminous layer would be scraped off.

The payloader that hit the boy on Wednesday was engaged in removing chunks of bitumen that were dumped after being scraped off, police said.

In just a 100m-stretch from the accident spot, Metro spotted at least 12 craters, some as deep as six inches.

Kanay Haldar, who lives in Gitanagar next to Dinesh Nagar, said the road had become difficult to negotiate as heaps of grounded bricks and stone chips were left dumped on the sides.

“The road gets narrower where the accident occurred because of such dumping of construction material. Aboy lost his life because ofthe KMC, which started the patchwork as a gimmick,” said Haldar.

Santosh Roy, Soumyo’s teacher, said several of his students have been complaining about the condition of the roads. Soumyo went to Roy for tuition. “The roads have been like this for years. My students who come riding on bicycles often complain. We have grown used to seeing this repair work just ahead of Puja,” said a grieving Roy.

Metro found two payloaders parked on Dinesh Nagar Road, which suggested an overnight push by the KMC to carry out patchwork with just a few days before Puja.

Abhijit Mukherjee, member, mayor-in-council, road, of the KMC, said: “Unless the KEIIP finishes the project, roads can’t be thoroughly repaired. I will seek a status report on Thursday after I reach office.”