Kolkata: Eight repairs in 10 months, but craters return to plague commuters at Ruby crossing

By: Chandreyi Chatterjee and Shaibalina Choudhury
KOLKATA: Eight repair stints in 10 months, but a pothole-ridden Ruby crossing — among Kolkata’s busiest intersections — remains a commuters’ nightmare. Bypass custodian KMDA, the agency implementing the Airport-Garia Metro corridor along this road, RVNL, and the police who man a stretch that regulates roughly 1 lakh-odd daily vehicular traffic and a 50,000-strong daily pedestrian crossover, are at a loss about how to untangle the multi-agency knot compounding the problem.Through all this, commuters continue to suffer.
Sabiha Ahmed Syed, a 36-year-old who regularly travels through this area, said, “The roads have too many craters, making them risky to drive on.”

“No matter how early I leave home, I hardly ever reach college on time. This is mostly because of the traffic situation. The potholes keep adding to the difficulty,” complained 19-year-old Richa Roy, who travels via this stretch to attend college.

The cops are equally exasperated. “We keep informing KMDA about the need for repairs and they have already fixed this stretch five-to-six times this year. On three or four occasions, we even had to engage locals to fill up the potholes with rubbish to avoid accidents,” an officer said, adding, “At one point, we had to send photographs to KMDA to stress on the importance of proper repairs. The road was touched up in the run-up to the Pujas, but the potholes resurfaced within less than a month. The bad condition of the road is prompting people to take the service roads, creating bottlenecks in some stretches.”
A KMDA officer said, “Temporary road repairs near Ruby crossing will never last long. The Metro project has damaged the road’s sub-base level and unless that is fixed, no repairs on the surface will hold up. We will need three-to-four days of uninterrupted access to the stretch to repair the sub-base level. It is up to the cops to decide on the time frame for shutting the crossing down.” Another official said, “We have proposed a north-south flyover from Kalikapur to VIP Bazar to allow faster commute and RITES is carrying out a feasibility study. We expect to get a report soon.”
No formal response was available from RVNL on Sunday. But an officer, requesting anonymity, said, “We have maintained we have no role in road repairs. It has been an accepted practise that KMDA repairs roads and we bear the expense. If KMDA feels it needs to do more to repair the Ruby crossing stretch, they should inform us. Having said that, digging up the road for Metro piers happened several years ago. Why is this issue being raised now?”