Elliot Park: Diameter 2 feet; depth five inches, slope inwards - those are the vital statistics of a death trap right in the middle of JL Nehru Road near Elliot Park.

The crater on the Esplanade-bound flank of the road has been growing while police and the civic authorities blame each other for the depression.

The police said they had alerted the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) repeatedly about the damaged portion of the road. A senior official of the civic body, on the other hand, said the police did not allow time for the repair work to harden before opening the road to traffic.

A police sergeant fell off his Royal Enfield on Friday when the front tyre of the two-wheeler skidded at the edge of the manhole, around which the crater is located. He lost control of the bike and fell but was lucky to escape with a few bruises as there were no vehicles immediately behind him.

Other two-wheelers had to brake suddenly and swerve left or right to avoid the crater. The jerk threw pillion-riders a few inches off the seat every time a bike or scooty went over the crater without slowing down. The crater is especially dangerous for scooties that have smaller wheels than motorbikes, a traffic sergeant said.

"I am always wary of this crater and try to keep to the left but it is not always possible when vehicles rush," said Bidhan Roy, 20, a student of an institute on Elgin Road who drives his scooty down the stretch every day.

Another biker, Shankar Biswas, said the particular stretch of JL Nehru Road was otherwise smooth, so the crater was all the more unexpected.

The crater started developing over a month ago and kept growing in size, a senior officer of the South Traffic Guard of Calcutta police said. "We intimated the CMC about the crater even two days ago. We have done the same thing many times over the past three weeks but no repairs or even a patchwork have been carried out. A serious accident is waiting to happen here," the officer said.

Soumitra Bhattacharya, director general (roads), CMC, said the civic body was aware of the problem and would mend it soon. But he said repairs had been carried out a few months ago and blamed the police for it wearing off.

"The police let us work on that stretch only at night and by 5am they allowed traffic to run again without cordoning off the area around the manhole. That is why the crater resurfaced," Bhattacharya said.