New system to keep track of city’s roads

The system will divide roads into clusters, get sub-engineers to supervise the repair work carried out on any road in the cluster.

After the successful launch of the pothole-tracking software, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) now plans to get Road Maintenance Management System, a new technology to maintain a record of repair works being conducted on roads in the city, within a month.

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The civic body will first feed the data on all the roads in the city into the software. The roads will then be divided into clusters or groups. Every group will get a sub-engineer from the central roads department, who will be responsible for the upkeep of the roads. Whenever any department takes up repair work on any road in the city, the information about the nature of the work and the department that has undertaken the work will be entered against the road. In case of any damage caused to the road, the engineer will have the power to directly appoint a contractor to fix it.

“On several occasions, the road engineers are not even informed about the work taken up on any road. Consequently, they are oblivious to the damage caused to the road because of it. The new system will ensure that the road engineer not only gets the information on the work, but also supervises it,” said a senior civic official from the roads department.

The system will categorise roads into acceptable and non-acceptable limits, based on their condition, and enlist them for repair accordingly, said officials. “The system will generate reports on the condition of roads based on their roughness index. This will help us in preparing budget estimates for the repair work,” said Girdharilal Aggarwal, acting chief engineer of roads.

Currently, civic officials are being trained to use the software before its launch.

Activists, however, seemed guarded on their opinion about the effectiveness of the system. “The BMC spends more on designing softwares than on tackling the problem. The new system, however, seems good as it would systematically assign work to engineers. But, we need a mechanism under which those fail to do their job would be made accountable,” said Nikhil Desai, civic activist.