Mumbai: All-in-one duct must? Not any more, says BMC

A cement concrete road was laid in Goregaon East in May. Pic/Anurag Ahire

The civic body has finally decided to take a flexible approach in laying ducts and utility wires, to expedite the concretisation of the city roads, officials told mid-day on Tuesday. mid-day reported in May that top civic babus were firm on laying all the utility wires through the ducts and then constructing the cement concrete roads, which had delayed the road construction work.

However, as per the new plan, the BMC will pass as many wires as possible through the cable duct while concretising the roads. For the remaining cables that stay directly underneath the road, the providers will be asked to send the lines through the duct whenever a problem arises.

This will prevent trenching of the cement concrete (CC) roads whenever repair is needed.

There are around 40 types of utility wires underneath the city roads for connections, including water, sewer, gas, electricity and internet.

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"We need to speed up the work. Ducts will prevent the trenching and increase the shelf life of roads. However, there is a huge network of cables underneath, on both sides of the roads. Putting all the wires through the duct is time and energy consuming. Hence we have decided to adopt a flexible approach," said a senior official from the Roads department.

He added, "If any cable that now remains directly under the road needs repair in the future, then instead of allowing trenching, we will ask the service provider to put a new line through the duct. Besides, some of the utilities like water, sewerage lines cannot go through the duct."

The BMC is laying a rectangular duct, with the sides measuring 150 mm by 300 mm and having compartments to separate power and communication lines. There is already a separate duct for gas pipes. The design of the ducts will be as per the roads, and if cases where rectangular ducts are not feasible, pipes will be laid. In such a case, the power and the communication cables will be in separate pipes.

The work of laying CC roads of 236 km across the city started in February, and ducts are being laid to avoid trenching for repair works. Top BMC officials wanted laying of all the cables through the ducts, but executive engineers found the idea impractical.

The CC road laying work halted as, communicating with all the service providers and shifting all the wires without uninterrupted services was a hectic job. The work on 140 roads began in October.