Mumbai: The western suburbs are set to get the lion’s share of the funds earmarked by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for concretising Mumbai’s roads. Nearly 65 percent of the ₹6,079.52 crore designated for the purpose will be spent here.
The BMC’s roads department on Friday re-floated tenders for road concretisation, which had been cancelled on November 1 on account of the poor response from bidders. According to the website, of the five tenders, three are for the western suburbs amounting to over ₹4,000 crore, followed by the city division which has one tender worth ₹1,233 crore. A tender worth ₹846 crore has been put out for the eastern suburbs.
The earlier ₹5,800-crore road-concretising tender process that was invited in August and cancelled by the BMC on November 1 was the highest in the history of the civic body. Civic officials had then said that the BMC planned to review the reasons for the poor response and, without compromising on quality, make the necessary changes, invite fresh terms and stipulate fresh conditions. The tender on road concretisation was accordingly reinvited on Friday.
“Most of the changes that needed to be made were already done in the previous tenders through multiple corrigenda,” Additional Commissioner (Projects) P Velrasu, told HT. “The new tenders have most of these conditions combined together in one instead of those separate corrigenda. There aren’t major changes in the tenders.”
Mumbai already has about 1,000 km of concrete roads. An additional 236.58 km are being constructed in financial year 2022-23 at a cost of ₹2,200 crore. The BMC has proposed to construct more than 400 km of cement-concrete roads this year and another 423 km of roads next year.
BMC commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal on September 30 had presented an action plan for a pothole-free Mumbai before a division bench of Chief Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Makarand Karnik. The bench was hearing a contempt petition filed by Advocate Ruju Thakker subsequent to his PIL on Mumbai’s potholes. Chahal informed the court that of the 2,050 kilometres of roads in Mumbai under the BMC, 990 kilometres had already been concretised while work was on on 265 kilometres.