BMC to shell out ₹7 crore to fill potholes

Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is set to shell out ₹7 crore to fix pothole-ridden city roads. Municipal commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal had earlier announced that all potholes need to be filled on an urgent basis after chairing a meeting on the civic body’s preparedness for the Ganpati festival.

P Velrasu, additional municipal commissioner (Projects), said that the BMC will issue the work order before Ganesh Utsav and the work will begin soon after.

“We have floated tender for three new techniques for filling the potholes in Mumbai. These potholes will be filled by using three innovative methods that we announced recently,” Velrasu told HT. The potholes will be filled using -- Geo Polymer mix, Fast Curing Concrete and Rapid Reactive Asphalt.

According to senior civic officials, the Geo-Polymer mix is a combination of sand, stone and polymer that will be used in filling the potholes. The officials said that this mixed solution will be poured inside the potholes to ensure the composition gets hardened faster which would eventually get merged with the surface of the road.

Similarly, fast curing concrete is a method of filling large cracks on roads by pouring the concrete solution into the gaps, while rapid reactive asphalt is the process of using hardened asphalt to fill potholes.

The BMC has been using cold-mix material for filling potholes since 2018, however, the success of this methodology has been questioned by citizens. Senior officials said that the primary objective why cold-mix usage is not very successful is because after a pothole is filled, it takes at least 12 hours for the potholes to stabilise and get dried up.

“These new methods that we intend to implement are costlier than the usual cold-mix method. Therefore, we need to float an additional tender for this task,” said a senior official.