Delhi: Your right to a wreck-less ride is crashing into craters

NEW DELHI: Near Sukhdev Vihar in south Delhi, driving is a hazardous activity. A 100-metre stretch towards Sarita Vihar is riddled with potholes that appeared during the monsoons last year. More than six months later, they continue to be a bane for daily commuters. The irony is the stretch lies right next to the Public Works Department’s road maintenance office, the M441, beneath the Modi Mills flyover.

But this is not an exception.Roads are in pitiable conditions in many parts of the city. Surprising, because usually the potholes and the degraded macadam are filled and repaired right after the rainy season. After TOI took a drive across the capital to assess the condition of the arterial roads, it found that stretches in south Delhi were particularly affected, not that they were any better in other regions.
TOI was rather flummoxed, therefore, when PWD officials insisted that all the roads in the city were in “excellent condition, barring for a few minor faults here and there”. They also argued that special vehicles scrutinised the roads everywhere and a vehicle equipped to fill potholes and make repairs did the rounds every day.
Yet when they were apprised about the poor state of some of the major roads that TOI saw, the officials claimed neither to have known about the disrepair nor been alerted about them by road users. Their argument seemed specious given that so many months have passed since the potholes appeared and these were not colony roads or little used lanes, but major traffic arteries. The officials wouldn’t comment any more than to say that these would be looked into.
Despite all such protestations, the truth is there for everyone to see. The Najafgarh road towards Uttam Nagar, for instance, is plagued by slow moving traffic right through the day. The only reason for this is the heavily potholed road: the swerving of all vehicles to one side of the narrow carriageway while avoiding the crumbled portions creates an arterial clot.
“There are potholes every few metres. What do we do? Who will listen to us?” grumbled Kirandeep, a businessman who uses the stretch going from Janakpuri to Nawada every day. For residents of areas like Janakpuri and Tilak Nagar, this is the only road that goes to Uttam Nagar, Nawada and Najafgarh.
TOI detected similarly cratered segments on the roads in Geeta Colony and Timarpur, in east and north Delhi, respectively. New Delhi was the only district with mostly good roads.
Even in what is normally thought to be better off south Delhi, the road near the Delhi Metro station at Nehru Place is an example of apathy, a harassment for the hundreds people who drive there to the eatery hub of Epicuria. Likewise at Sukhdev Vihar, Satyaniketan, Maharani Bagh and Ishwar Nagar near Ashram. But the poor state of the very visible roads here seems to have escaped the attention of PWD.
“No matter what you are in, be it a bus or a car or an autorickshaw, the potholes can wreak havoc on your body as well as the vehicle,” said Manish Kumar, a south Delhi businessman. “Recently one of my factory employees broke his leg after hitting a pothole and losing control of his motorcycle.”
Since any road repair comes to a halt during the rainy season, PWD has a few months left to bring back the city’s roads to normality. However, they can do so only if they acknowledge the derelict state of roads. But road users might not be too happy to learn that the PWD website proclaims that all roads in the city have been repaired and the potholes filled.