BENGALURU: If you see men bending and peering at a road, don’t get alarmed. It is the BBMP engineers counting the number of potholes on the city roads. These days they are busy with this exercise as it would help them later to fix them.
While residents in the city are skeptical of this ‘hole’ exercise, officials on the ground spoke to Express about the challenges they face. Like new potholes springing up every day following rains, making their task difficult.
“Many of us have been doing the job manually. We go around the area along with contractors and note down the number of potholes and other details. With rains lashing the City every night, these numbers are increasing,” said an engineer. He said waterlogging also alters the dimensions of the potholes.
“We go along with the contractor, measure the potholes and provide an estimate to fill these. When we visit the same spot a day or two later, the potholes would have become deeper. The other parameters also change following this,” said another BBMP engineer.
The BBMP has estimated that there are 20,000 potholes on the city roads. These, however, are the ones of larger dimension only. According to BBMP sources, only those potholes of above 1*1 foot dimension are being considered by engineers.Meanwhile, those roads with large number of potholes are regarded as “bad surface”and would not be considered while counting.