The BMC will spend Rs 500 crore from its Mumbai beautification project to resurface 200km of roads in the city. The project, which was announced last week, is the brainchild of chief minister Eknath Shinde.
While the estimated cost of the entire beautification project is Rs 1,705 crore of which every ward will get a minimum of Rs 15 crore for coming up with plans to beautify their respective areas in the form of improving road dividers, traffic islands, illumination of popular junctions and improvement of footpaths, another component of the project will be the resurfacing of roads for which tenders are still to be floated. Additional municipal commissioner P Velrasu, who is in charge of the roads department, said the civic body will be calling for short tenders.
“Of the total road network of 2,050 km, about 1,000km are already concretised while we had issued work orders for another 200km earlier this year. Besides, for another 400km of cement concretisation of roads too tenders have already gone live. We now plan to take up works for resurfacing of approximately 200km of roads. We are short-listing the roads which will be taken up. These will include those whose only top layer need to be resurfaced. Roads that have been damaged till the bottom layer will not be taken up for works now. We will undertake complete repairs on them in the future,” Velrasu said.
Mastic asphalt will be used to resurface roads that will be taken up for repairs and the work is expected to be completed before the next monsoon, officials said. However, it is also pertinent to note that with the upcoming civic elections and bad roads being one of the biggest pain points for Mumbaikars, the entire project looks to have been set rolling. The BMC has set a target of cement concretisation of the entire road network. So it is likely that even these 200km roads will be take up for concretisation.
