BENGALURU: The BBMP will soon have an ‘Emergency Response Team’, an exclusive agency that will be responsible for road repairs. This would mean that the team would restore the roads dug up the BWSSB and BMRC.
K T Nagaraj, BBMP superintendent engineer, said, “The initiative has been approved by the Chief Secretary Joint Committee and now the Standard Operating Procedure has to be agreed upon by BMRCL MD and DULT chief V Manjula. Once that’s done, we will call for a tender. It will be an annual contract.”
The agency is likely to be announced by November 1. Any agency digging up roads will first have to deposit money with the BBMP which would be moved to a special fund. The funds will be directed to the Emergency Response Team. All the verifications will be moved online, although necessary physical verification will also be carried out. BWSSB or any other agency digging up roads will also have to provide proof of completion of work by producing photographs of roads before and after civic work. Permission to dig roads will be given only 1km at a time.
‘Python’ may not come back
A year ago, ‘Python’, a machine that patches potholes, was touted as the solution to city potholes. But the BBMP is reluctant to bring it back. Python is a vehicle that is operated by one person. It can patch a two-foot (.6m) pothole in about two minutes.
Urban expert R K Mishra said, “Pothole filling is a scam here. BBMP does not have a process to address the pothole issue. Rather, it waits for the number of potholes to increase so that it can call for a tender. Corporators got together to put a stop on using the Python and approached the Mayor. He stopped the use of the machine and ordered an inquiry.”
K T Nagaraj, BBMP superintendent engineer for major works, agreed that the Python was quite efficient. “We had to stop it because the contract with the private party was over and a fresh tender for filling potholes had to be called,” he said.