K R S Road: One more broken promise

Contractor Chennaiah and every other officer present said that the entire work will be completed in the next 40 days.

When the DC asked about the lighting works that was to be executed, again in unison, all and sundry assured that the work would be carried out within 40 days.

On May 6, with only four days remaining for the promised 40 days, we were greeted by heaps of mud, rubble, everywhere from VVWW till the new railway bridge.  We found intermittently completed concrete retention wall works near Ladies’ Hostel side and very limited work on Railway Museum side. Concrete retention wall and the drainage works from the bridge till VVWW we think is not even 40 percent complete of the total requirement.

The concrete foundation for the road work, let alone the bitumen surfacing, on this side of the bridge in our estimate, is not even 30 percent complete of the total required work.
The works from Dasappa Circle to railway bridge is still at UG drainage man-hole construction stage.

The rainwater drainage work still need to be linked to the underground tunnel on the Babu Jagjivan Ram and Dasappa circle and incomplete on the Mandovi Motors side.
On this stretch of KRS Road concrete foundation work cannot be taken up till these UG manhole and the pipeline work as also the rainwater drainage works are complete.

There is also the fate of the three trees standing at the periphery of the newly expanded road work.

Two passages under newly constructed railway bridge are still filled with the high level mud on one side and effort to dislodge the strong stone wall of the old bridge right at the centre of the other side is going on.

The supervisor for the road and retention wall works put the entire blame for the delay squarely on the contractor in charge of water and UG drainage pipelines for not completing their part of the work.

He said that at least one side of the road work will be completed during next 30 days and traffic will be allowed on this stretch. Work on the other side will be taken up subsequent to this.  This means that certainly the time required for completing both sides of the road will be more than the next two Months.

Supervisors working for the UG and Drainage works said they estimated this road will require at least two months for completion. Yet no one is talking about dividers, electric poles and lights; and planting of bushes and the trees!!

The promise to complete this road within 40 days has been blatantly broken. Looking at the pace of work, lack of coordination among the agencies and the missing top level constant supervision and intervention, this road will not see completion even during next 60 days.

It was a promise of all the agencies and the high level officers in a meeting held in public to none other than the deputy commissioner, the topmost bureaucrat of the district.

The moot question is - should not some-one be held accountable for such a casual approach to this crucial link road by our elected representatives?

- R Chandra Prakash and Dr Bhamy V Shenoy, MGP