Roads in a pocket of Mukundapur that has three private hospitals, at least one school, and several housing complexes, are lying in tatters.
Ambulances with patients or pool cars ferrying children have to ply through the pothole-ridden roads to reach their destinations.
On Sunday, an ambulance driver told Metro they have to be very careful while driving patients to and out of hospitals, especially if they were ferrying a pregnant woman or someone with a fracture or a patient who underwent spinal cord surgery. Driving after a spell of rain is more difficult as the roads become treacherous.
Potholes filled with muddy water are impossible to gauge and often difficult to spot, the ambulance driver said.
Vehicles often move from one side of the road to the other to dodge a battered stretch.
Two weeks ago, EM Bypass was in dire straits until the Kolkata Municipal Corporation intervened, but the roads leading from the Bypass still desperately need repairs.
Metro drove through the roads on Sunday afternoon.
A 500-metre stretch of Nitai Nagar Road had multiple smaller stretches riddled with potholes. The road running in front of Birla High School and Manipal Hospitals, Mukundapur, is in a horrible condition.
Multiple potholes, many of them filled with muddy water, and worn-out surfaces were hard to dodge on this road. Mukundapur Main Road was comparatively better, but a stretch of the road in Barakhola, near Utalika, a residential complex, also had worn-off portions and potholes.
"One of the flanks of Mukundapur Main Road, near its intersection with EM Bypass, is blocked because of some infrastructure work, which is why I take other roads in the area. Stretches of Nitai Nagar Road or the stretch of the road near Birla High School campus are full of potholes," said a resident of Utalika.
He said the alternative roads are also narrower and their width is further shrunk by cars remaining parked on both sides. "Sometimes people have to get out of their cars and ask the drivers of the parked cars to move to be able to go," he said.
Mohammad Afham, from Jharkhand's Godda district, whose brother-in-law has been under treatment at RN Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences for a month, said he had to come to the hospital every day, bearing the pain of travelling down the pothole-ridden stretches of the area. "For over a month, I had to travel on these roads. I feel they should be improved," he said.
Baidyanath Mondal, the driver of an ICU ambulance, narrated the struggle of driving through the roads. The families are ever-anxious about injuries to the patients if the ambulance falls into a pothole, he said.
"The family members always keep telling us to drive very slowly and avoid potholes. But it often becomes difficult to spot a pothole after a spell of rain," he said.
A KMC official said the civic body's borough teams undertake repairs of the interior roads whenever they find a dry spell. "The continuous rain is delaying the repairs, but we will take it up as early as possible," he said.