BMC took twice as long to resolve road complaints in 2020

31 Jul 2021 CW Team

A road-related complaint took Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation(BMC) over two months to handle in 2020, compared to 31 days in 2019. The number of complaints resolved decreased by 67%, compared to 95% in 2019.

This information was included in the June report card of the NGO Praja on the state of civic issues in Mumbai.

As we have reported earlier, BMC had spent Rs 21,000 crore on road building and maintenance during the previous 24 years and that it took several days to handle concerns about substandard roads.

Nitai Mehta, a trustee of the Praja Foundation, said that Mumbai residents were dealing with a pandemic and that few were leaving their homes.

Work-from-home policies had become commonplace in most offices.

According to Mehta, no one can be held directly responsible for bad roads because blame is always passed down from elected officials to BMC officials and contractors.

Traffic complaints in 2020 totalled 6,908, down from 15,239 in 2019, according to Praja data obtained under the Right to Information Act (RTI).

Mumbai is an international city, but its roads are not up to international standards, according to Andheri MLA Ameet Satam, whose RTI request revealed that the road department had spent over Rs 21,000 crore since 1997.

Rais Shaikh, a Byculla corporator and MLA, said that over the last ten years, he has repeatedly stated that the BMC is incapable of maintaining roads and has exposed various scams.

In 2015, after complaints of shoddy work, BMC civic chief Ajoy Mehta appointed a committee to investigate roads repaired in the previous three years.

A preliminary evaluation revealed that almost all of the work on roads reviewed by the committee was substandard.

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Also read: BMC to redevelop and beautify Saat Rasta in central Mumbai

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