BMC plans concrete side-strips to counter Mumbai's pothole menace

Haphazard digging along the side- strips has damaged most of the roads in the city

With a view to reducing potholes on roads, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has come up with a policy decision to concretise even the side-strips. This decision comes almost a month after the civic body made concretisation of footpaths mandatory. According to civic officials, the side-strips of cement concrete (CC) roads, which used to be laid using paver blocks and asphalt, will now have passage concrete.

Sources from BMC said, earlier, paver blocks and asphalt were used for the side-strips as those stretches have a number of utilities underneath them and the materials would make it easier for workers to dig up the portions. However, it has been observed in the past that continuous and haphazard digging damaged most of the roads. Hence, with the new policy, the civic body aims at solving this problem. It would also help streamline the process of digging trenches and encourage the use of cutter machines for laying, replacing or repairing the underground utilities. The sources further said that on a pilot basis some of the side-strips in the suburbs were concretised last year and the results have been positive.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a civic official said, "Contractors will use a layer of concrete wherever the CC roads need to be repaired. Majority of the potholes appear on the side-strips, which eventually lead to traffic chaos. We have taken a policy decision to replace asphalt and paver blocks with cement for the side-strips. Before this asphalt was being used to ensure that the concrete doesn't get damaged due to constant digging, but now the trenching work will be done with cutter machines. This will help in placing the concrete blocks back properly."

The policy has been sent to Municipal Commissioner Ajoy Mehta for his approval. However, even after repeated attempts to contact Mehta, he remained unavailable for comments.

Concrete footpaths
As part of BMC's policy of using concrete for footpaths as well, roads which are more than 90- feet wide would have stencil concrete or cement concrete on the footpaths, and those which are over 60- feet wide would have only cement concrete on footpaths. The footpaths would then be levelled using marble chips or brooming texture. Several wards of the city have already started implementing this policy.

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