While the common man has had to lumber over crumbling roads for the last six months, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation repaired and refurbished the approach roads to the residence of Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy in MLA Colony, Road No 12, Banjara Hills overnight. In a super-efficient exercise, as Kiran Kumar Reddy took the reigns, the civic body ensured that the ride to the new CM’s house is smooth. The usual reasons cited for the tardiness in repairing the city’s roads — budget constraints, rainy days, inadequate work force — seemed to serendipitously vanish, allowing engineers and contractors to fix the road in just two nights.
Officials have no qualms in admitting that the VIP tag gets work done ASAP. “The approach roads to the CM’s house were part of the overall road repair and re-carpeting works to be taken up in the entire city. We only expedited the work because he is the Chief Minister,” GHMC Chief Engineer Dhan Singh told this correspondent.
Not surprisingly, the rest of the city will have to wait. “It will take two months to fix all the bad roads in the city. We have only 20 contractors and each of them has 15 to 20 work orders. Re-carpeting of all roads cannot be taken up simultaneously because of vehicular traffic issues, so they will take them up gradually,” the Chief Engineer said. And the good news gets diluted even further: the GHMC, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to use a band-aid approach and re-carpet only damaged portions of the road and not the entire stretch causing a patchwork effect.
The GHMC has sanctioned Rs 60 crore for repair and re-carpeting of just 180 km road stretches in the city. Of this, Rs 45 crores worth of work has already been awarded to contractors who claim they have already started the re-carpeting in bits and pieces.
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