Hyderabad: The GHMC and Hyderabad Road Development Corporation Limited are running out of funds for road repairs and they owe Rs 430.50 crore to contractors. Bills have piled up for four months.
The HRDCL has spent Rs 500 crore towards road repairs in the last 18 months and it cannot borrow more without the government’s counter guarantee. Officials said that contractors had decided to halt road repairs.
Officials claimed that the GHMC had cleared Rs 65 crore out of the total of Rs 165 crore outstanding bills and the HRDCL claimed that it would soon clear bills after taking loans from banks or any other agencies.
A senior HRDCL official said that the agency would take a Rs 4,000-crore loan from various banks and funding agencies immediately after the Cabinet expansion as the government should give counter guarantee.
The official assured that it would immediately clear the bills for the work executed by contractors and the GHMC as well. He said that during 2019, focus will be fully on city roads and citizens can witness surgical changes.
After being ignored for decades, the planned preventive maintenance works were cleared by the state government and they were sanctioned Rs 722 crore in February this year. The funds are to be released via the HRDCL, the special purpose vehicle created to build major roads.
The GHMC has taken up work to build footpaths on 320-kilometres of city roads where PPM work was scheduled to be done. So far, however, the government has released only Rs 65 crore for the work completed, and bills worth '60 crore to Rs 65 crore and more are pending with the municipal administration and urban development department.
Of the 52 works of bitumen road laying, stretching into 800 lane km, only nine have been completed while about 40 are in progress. The rest are held up.
Work on building cement concrete roads, which are more hardly and last longer, began late owing to the technicalities involved, and none of the 56 scheduled work in 556 lane kilometres have been completed yet.
In 49 stretches, work is in progress. On the whole, only 53 per cent of the BT works and 43 per cent of the CC works have been completed so far.
