Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has imposed a meagre ₹31,000 penalty on a road contractor, after a cement-concrete road in Mulund cracked open, within two months after it was thrown open. Civic officials said that the cost of constructing the road was pegged at ₹6.5 crore and the road was opened for public use in June, just before the monsoon made its landfall in Mumbai.
After the road-cracking incident, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator from Mulund, Mihir Kotecha demanded that the road contractor be blacklisted.
“Cement concrete roads are supposed to last for at least 10-15 years, but this road cracked in just two months. The penalty of ₹31,000 is a cruel joke. BMC must conduct an enquiry and suspend the BMC engineers who cleared this road and allowed it to be open to the public. The contractor needs to be blacklisted for at least two years,” Kotecha said.
He also said that the BMC needs to do a sample testing of all the roads that have been constructed by this company in the past few years.
Following Kotecha’s complaints, the BMC issued a notice to the private contractor asking them to resurface the road works.
Meanwhile, in a notice issued to the contractors, the BMC said that 25% cost of the slab per cracked panel should be recovered as a penalty. “During our routine inspection, it was observed that several portions of the road were cracked open. According to the tender document, 25% cost of the slab per cracked panel shall be recovered as a penalty. Therefore, a penalty amount of ₹31,550 is imposed on you for this lapse which is 25% of the total cost of the damaged proportion of road and you are also directed to redo the concretisation of this panel,” the BMC Roads Department said in its notice to the contractor.
“A stretch of 300 meters has been damaged and we will be carrying out resurfacing works only after the monsoon season gets over post-October. Our engineers will be present at the spot to supervise the work,” said an official.