On Monday, the BBMP astonished the court with its claim: 90 per cent of potholes in the city have been filled. It was ridiculed by the petitioner, for the BBMP's tally of 3,071 potholes has been termed outrageous by experts, who think the number is more likely around 12,000. The machinations of a corrupt administrative authority are being exposed, for the contractors, who are legally accountable for the condition of roads clearly aren't doing their jobs. They’re getting away with it - and how! The rot runs all the way to the top, say experts, with officials more concerned with commissions from contractors than actually doing their jobs. Even the current flurry of activity is more to appease the Court than an honest effort at repairing the city’s roads, report S.M. Shashi Prasad and Nischith N.
It’s now evident that unless Big Brother is watching, the BBMP does not wake up to its duties, whether against illegal hoardings, flexes and banners or potholes that have claimed lives in the city. As the civic agency apathetically watched the roads it had asphalted not so long ago, deteriorate in the monsoon, it took a slap on its wrist by the High Court for it to swing into action and repair them.
A clearly fed up division bench headed by Chief Justice Dinesh Maheshwari and Justice S G Pandit, which was hearing a PIL filed in 2015 on the subject, gave the civic agency less than a day on September 19 this year to fill all the potholes in the city. “There should be zero potholes by tomorrow. It is left to you how you do it. You have one whole night,” the bench said, laying down its ultimatum and noting that keeping roads in good condition was a necessity. The next day the agency came back to the court to claim that it had found 3071 potholes and filled up 899 of them overnight. Only, it was held up to ridicule by the petitioner's advocate , who heard the BBMP’s submission in complete disbelief and argued that there were at least 12,000 potholes in the city and it had merely scratched the surface.
When the case came up for hearing again on Monday (September 24), the BBMP made another astounding claim. It said it had filled up about 90 per cent of all potholes in the city without quantifying their number. “The work is continuing because several new potholes have been discovered,” it told the court, submitting a detailed status report on the job carried out, naming the roads, the size of the potholes filled and the name of the contractor who did the job. For good measure, it even produced photographs taken before and after execution of the work.
If the BBMP is to be believed potholes have been filled in seven of the 44 wards in Malleshwaram West Zone, seven wards of Mahalakshmi Layout West Zone and four of the 11 wards in the Yelahanka Zone.
And to impress on the court saw that it is doing a professional job, the civic agency informed it that it was repairing the roads with the help of experts like Prof. G.L.S. Shiva Kumar Babu and Dr. Rajiv B. Mallick of the Civil Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Science.
But hardly convinced, the court appointed an independent commission to verify its claims. And so now the BBMP’s work will be inspected by Mr Dinesh Agrawal, Superintending Engineer, CWE (Army), Bengaluru, Military Engineer Services, and M.G.Uma, Member Secretary, Karnataka State Legal Services Authority, who will report back to the judges.
“The ward numbers and the areas (where the work has been completed on filling the potholes) must be supplied to the members of the Commission by the Chief Engineer, BBMP, who will also be expected to be present at the sites with all the relevant particulars,” the court ordered while adjourning the matter for further hearing to Tuesday, September 25.
As the court drama unfolds with the BBMP cutting a sorry figure every hearing, Bengalureans are getting a real sense of how inept their civic agencies are. Says one resident of Rajarajeshwari Nagar, Rajeev, “This only proves that civic agencies, which are supposed to work for the welfare of the city, don’t do their job unless they are pulled up by the courts. And even now its hard to believe the BBMP is doing good quality work. On what basis is it coming up with these numbers? It could just be an act to escape more flak from the judiciary.”
Contractors are liable, why aren’t they held accountable?
The BBMP, which is once again at the receiving end of the high court’s ire, this time on the condition of the city’s roads, passes the buck, as usual, on the contractors it engages to asphalt and maintain them. A senior BBMP official explains that the city has two kinds of roads, arterial and sub-arterial and the contractor is responsible for the maintenance of residential roads for a year after laying it and for three years when it comes to major roads. Under the rules, five per cent of the contract value is collected in the form of a security deposit from , which is returned to the contractor on completion of the DLP (Defect Liability Period). " If the contractor doesn’t maintain the roads, we send him a notice and he has to forfeit the security deposit. For defaulters who fail to reply to the notices, our engineers recommend action be taken against them,” says a BBMP zonal Engineer , claiming that the civic agency takes the DLP very seriously. “Recently, based on a private complaint, we blacklisted 32 contractors for not following the DLP rule. In most cases, the contractors know they could lose their contracts if they fail to maintain the roads and reply to our notices," he adds. But civic activists are sceptical about the BBMP’s claims, arguing that the condition of the roads are a clear giveaway that no contractor is doing his job. “We know that it is clearly mentioned in the agreements and the tender documents that the contractor is responsible for repair of the roads. But these people are not ready to do anything to maintain them. They only want to earn some commission money from the contractor. And now, although they are busy filling potholes, the question is how good the quality of the material used is. This work is being done only to help the BBMP file a report in court. Once this is done, Bengaluru will once again be a pothole city,” says an activist Akshay R, wryly.
