Every road user in the city has nursed the after-effects of juddering over the tens of hundreds of potholes of all sizes. The civic authorities' desultory efforts to fill them only result in these craters reappearing sooner rather than later. No wonder our pothole-scarred roads entice manufacturers of such equipment to come to Bangalore and demonstrate to the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) that their machines are the best solution to their problem.
Demo in Malleswaram
On Thursday again, one such firm came forward and demonstrated how its machine could fill potholes and level the roads in a jiffy. The company, Speed Craft, filled nearly 10 potholes on Malleswaram Link Road and surrounding roads. The machine took around 40 minutes to fill and level a pothole measuring 20 sq. m.
According to a senior BBMP official, the machine uses cold process with rapid setting emulsion. Curiously, the BBMP, whose budget itself has one of the biggest holes, claims it has still not asked the company about the machine's price tag.
Delhi trip
Just a few months ago, a delegation, including Deputy Mayor S. Harish, went to New Delhi to check out the machine used by New Delhi City Corporation for the past one-and-a-half years to fill potholes. The cold mix machine — Jet Patcher — uses technology from New Zealand and fills potholes in 15 minutes. The BBMP had planned to procure one machine for Rs. 1.5 crore on a trial basis.
Mr. Harish said Speed Craft was an Indian company that had technology similar to that of the Jet Patcher. “The same company had supplied another pothole filling machine some 10 years ago to the civic authority. Nobody now knows what happened to it.”
Left to rot
These are not the only forays by BBMP to fill the city's potholes. The Hindu had earlier reported on how the hot mix plant, hailed as the mother of all solutions to potholes, was gathering dust in Koramangala. The said machine, dumped on a BBMP property, is still there, surrounded by garbage trucks.
