The Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) was able to fill only 899 potholes till 6 a.m. on Thursday out of the 1,655 potholes that existed as on September 19 after the Karnataka High Court had said that it expects the BBMP to ensure that the city has ‘zero’ potholes by Thursday.
Interestingly, the BBMP’s Engineer-in-Chief (In-charge) M.R. Venkatesh has stated in an affidavit that additional 1,416 potholes were detected in the intervening night of September 19 and 20 when the BBMP engineers were in the process of attending to the potholes. As many as 899 potholes of the 1,655 potholes were attended to and closed till 6 a.m. on September 20, he has stated in the affidavit while seeking three days ‘to close all the potholes’ in the city.
The affidavit was submitted to a division bench comprising Chief Justice Dinesh Maheshwari and Justice S.G. Pandit during the hearing of a petition filed in 2015 by Vijayan Menon and three others complaining about the pathetic conditions of roads in the city. Details of the work of closing potholes since September 19 were submitted to the court in a pen drive.
As per the statistics submitted to the court, there are 2,172 more potholes in the city and the highest number (709) is in Mahadevapura zone, followed by Yelahanka zone (379) and Bommanahalli (321).
West zone has the least number of potholes (27), Rajarajeshwari Nagar zone has 55 followed by East zone (68) and South (71). There are 125 potholes in Dasarahalli zone.
There are 417 potholes to be attended to under the BBMP’s Road Infrastructure wing.
Accepting the request for three more days to close all the pothole, the bench said orally that the BBMP is required to achieve ‘zero’ potholes by September 24. If it achieves the target of ‘zero’ potholes, it cannot be termed as ‘heroic’, as maintaining roads in the condition worthy for use is a basic duty of the BBMP, the bench observed orally.
The court also directed the BBMP to produce photocopies of first and last pages of measurement books related to pothole repairs undertaken in all the 198 wards for the next hearing on Monday.
