The Hindu : Front Page : Bad roads in city hit sweeping machines too

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Saturday, Aug 23, 2008
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Bad roads in city hit sweeping machines too

Sweeping machines clean up 900 km of main roads everyday
Rs. 500 cr. allotted for roads and pavements for current year

Sweeping machine at work on a road in the city.

HYDERABAD: If you are among the scores of people getting choked by rising and swirling dust on city roads after the recent rains apart from bumpy rides, blame it on bad maintenance of thoroughfares.

Even if officials want to shrug off their responsibility by pointing out that it was “normal” for roads to take a beating during monsoon, the otherwise shoddy work got exposed further when modern sweeping-cum-mopping machines were unable to do their work effectively.

Crores of rupees are pumped in each year for road maintenance and close to Rs. 500 crore has been allotted for roads and pavements for the current year in the municipal budget.

The six large and 25 small sweeping machines cleaning up to 900 kilometres of main roads (of the 8,000 km under GHMC) for about eight hours everyday are finding it difficult to mop up the dust because of unevenness of road and partly also due to washed up silt and sand.

“The machine personnel have to manually operate the hosepipe to do an efficient job and doing this often means considerable slowing down of work,” said a senior official. Ironically, temporary pothole filling is causing more dust to rise and pebbles to scatter since the machine’s iron-brush sweeping and sucking in of dust are removing the filled in gravel.

“We have identified certain sections of roads to be repaired for better sanitation but it was not followed up,” rued the official.

Expense per hour

GHMC spends Rs. 700 an hour for a small machine and Rs. 900 an hour for operating the big machine.

Though they have been able to save many a life having replaced manual night sweeping, large road swathes are still being swept by the labour despite the danger of being hit or run over lurking by.

“We are aware of the risks of manual night sweeping but we cannot hasten automation as there is livelihood issues involved,” said the official.

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