As the bumpy ride on many of the city’s roads continues to attract anger and ridicule from citizens, residents of areas where Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled through recently got lucky over the last week. The city’s civic body spent ₹23 crore to redo 14 km of road ahead of his visit, including stretches of Mysuru Road and Ballari Road.
This is apart from road works that Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) took up near Kommaghatta, where the Prime Minister held a public rally and laid foundation stone for several infrastructure works.
P.N. Ravindra, Special Commissioner (Projects), Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), addressing a press conference on Tuesday, said the roads that Mr. Modi travelled were taken up for redevelopment a week ago on top priority and works were carried out day-and-night.
“The road works involved re-asphalting of roads, re-doing service roads, replacing faulty street lights, medians, painting of kerb stones, and other related works,” he said. The works were taken up with funds from the chief civic commissioner’s discretionary funds, with the approval of Urban Development Department (UDD), he added.
When quizzed on the priorities of the civic body, as to how these roads were redeveloped in a week even as they blamed rains for filling potholes in the rest of the city, Mr. Ravindra said other works were also underway and claimed only 1,600 odd potholes were left on the city streets to be filled. “Filling potholes is tedious work and usually affected by rains. But redeveloping an entire stretch of road is far easier,” he said.
Apart from this, the BDA took up redevelopment of 5.5 km road from Shirke Apartments to Kommaghatta, while Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd. (BMRCL) also sped up its work on Mysuru Road.
