Calcutta, Sept. 27: Bowing to pressure from the high court and other agencies, mayor Subrata Mukherjee has announced the sanction of Rs 25 crore for a pre-Puja mastic asphalt repair scheme for the city?s roads.
?We have released Rs 11 crore for initiating work at the mayor-in-council meeting,? the mayor said, after a meeting with municipal affairs minister Asok Bhattacharya at Writers? Buildings.
The repair scheme will be carried out in two phases.
Phase I, for which Rs 11 crore has been released, will cover major roads where trams do not ply. These include Sarat Bose Raod, Hazra Road, Beadon Street, Kalighat Road, Alipore, Chetla Road, Sambhunath Pandit Street, DL Khan Road. Bagbazar Street, Raja Dinendra Street, Beleghata Main Road, Debendra Phatik Road, Christopher Road, Palm Avenue, Ritchie Road, Rifle Range Road and Picnic Garden Road.
Though Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) engineers pointed out that Phase I cannot be completed before the Pujas, the mayor demanded that work to start right away.
Calcutta High Court had pulled up the CMC, CMDA and the public works department for the condition of the roads. The court has asked the three agencies to table details of repairs initiated within a fortnight.
The CMC needs 25 clear and sunny days to cover the craters. According to civic engineers, over 900 km of roadspace is potholed. The crater diameter, put together, will touch 3.5 lakh square metres, they said.
The mastic asphalt repair will follow after the potholes have been filled. Though it costs four times more than ordinary bitumen cover, the mastic surface lasts about 10 years. At present, about 56 km of road surface has mastic asphalt, of a total road length of 1,500 km.
Phase II of the repair scheme will cover 28 km of roads on which trams ply.
These include APC Road, AJC Bose Road, Bidhan Sarani, Central Avenue, Rabindra Sarani, Amherst Street, MG Road, Bhupen Bose Avenue, Sovabazar Street, Beleghata Main Road, RG Kar Road, Lenin Sarani and SN Banerjee Road.
However, the mayor made it clear that the CMC will not repair the CTC? share of road surface, that is, 18 inches on either side of tram tracks.
