14 BMP Teams Assure Public Of ‘No-Superficial’ Kind Of Job

Road-beautification drive on
14 BMP Teams Assure Public Of ‘No-Superficial’ Kind Of Job
By Smitha Rao
The Times of India

Bangalore: They are painting the town yellow. BMP has taken up an Herculean exercise aimed at identifying the extent of damage to roads. On Tuesday, engineers went about the city marking out roads which need to be redone in a holistic manner.

Infantry Road stretch from Central Lodge to Safina Plaza, Shivajinagar (near the bus stand), Cunningham Road, Queen’s Road, Nandidurg Road, Crescent Road, Miller’s Road are some of the places marked for refurbishing.

In the new re-laying exercise, roads apparently will be handled layer by layer, and in a gradation so as to enable free flow of rain water. A la New Delhi, channels will be equipped with kerbs. All engineers have been screaming hoarse for years now against water, “the biggest enemy of asphalt”.

Presently, roads get damaged not because of rain lashing down mightily but because rain water stagnates, seeps right in destroying the road. Like a vicious circle, rain water stagnates due to lack of channel for them to flow out. To set right this anomaly, channels are being drilled underneath the pavements of arterial roads. This has already been done at Cubbon Road and authorities are confident of avoiding stagnation and water pools henceforth.

Explains BMP engineer-inchief P K Srihari who galvanised 14 teams of engineers to inspect roads across the city: “When we are forced to use short-term measures, the engineers patch the surface of damaged roads. Right now, we will be tackling the road in its entirety to avoid a superficial job. There’s a technical specification we use called re-chip carpeting, this will be done across the city.’’

Apparently when workers and gang-men slit down even a section of any road, they are greeted with truck-loads of floating material which block the water and consequently lead to an artificial scenario of flooding.

Another perennial problem obstructing the good roads from the ‘terrible’ ones is constant water leakages from underground pipes. Consequently, half the road near the pavement caves in and motorists use the other half, again leading to an artificial scenario of traffic jams.