Now, BMC imparts road lessons to Chennai

Even while the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) struggles to find a solution to the city's road woes, it keeps itself busy imparting lessons on making better roads to its Chennai counterparts.

Even while the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) struggles to find a solution to the city's road woes, it keeps itself busy imparting lessons on making better roads to its Chennai counterparts.

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Tired of the bad press the city's municipal corporation garners every monsoon, a delegation of civic engineers from the corporation of Chennai (CoC) is on a three-day visit to the city to study how to make better roads. This, ironically, comes at a time when the BMC itself is struggling to find a way to ensure that the city's roads are made and maintained efficiently.

A senior engineer of the COC delegation, who did not wish to be named, said: "Despite being a metropolitan city, Chennai does not have a single cement-concrete road, while nearly 25% of Mumbai's road network is concretised. Hence, we wanted to gain expertise from the BMC officials."

COC officials also said Chennai was likely to use the Ultra Thin White Technology for roads, a technique the BMC has been experimenting with. Vishal Thombare, assistant engineer of the city's roads department, who has been handling the technology's experiments said: "The officials from Chennai saw many of our roads, and even those which we have constructed using the UTWT and were very impressed."

When asked if they had heard about the city's bad roads and seen any of them, a member of the delegation said: "We saw some roads in areas like Nariman Point, Chembur and Worli among others, and felt that they were good quality roads. Of course, there were a few potholes here and there, but those were just minor defects."