Have you ever stepped out of your house and found your leg stuck in the dirt of a dug up road? If yes, then you must be a Bengalurean! People living in Bengaluru, experience that every other month. Not that we are not grateful for the new roads but just the fact that no one gets informed ahead of time and the constructions just start out of the blue.
We hear about Monday Blues but we speak to the people who feel blue everyday cause of the dug up roads.
Mithun Manohar, a manager for a research firm expresses his plight and says, “It is a nightmare! No proper alternate routes are planned in many cases. Relatively good roads are being white topped. The Metro project is simultaneously carried out as well as several flyover projects that have not been completed. Many roads have been damaged due to excavation and installation of water pipes and none of these have been repaired. Authorities need to start thinking of completing a project before moving on to the next and need to listen to the citizens and be sensitive about the daily challenges that people face.”
Mithun Manohar
There’s just not the issue with one road being dug up but multiple of other projects destroying the roads. Amit Amarnath an advocate and a founder of an NGO says, “As far as digging up of the roads is concerned I would say that there is absolutely no coordination between the civic authorities like BBMP, BESCOM, BWSSB and others. Why I say that is because you can observe, the BBMP asphalts a road by spending the tax payer’s money and maybe just a week later or so you can see the BESCOM or the BWSSB digging up the freshly asphalted roads under the guise of some repair work. First of all the BBMP asphalts a road only once in five years that too as a result of continuous requests and follow ups made by the citizens/residents. But, all the struggle to get the roads asphalted goes in vain in such short time.”
For some people these roads might be more than just an inconvenience but an everyday struggle to get back home from work.
Rhea Chopra, who works at a management firm near Koramangala says, “I travel 24 km one way everyday to office. Which in itself on Bengaluru roads is no less a nightmare. But with the white topping, the nightmare has turned unbearable as there is dust on the roads, huge potholes and it is creating such a lot of chaos across the city. Since the Forum Mall road was being white topped, we were diverted towards Vivek Nagar and stuck in a jam for over two hours. Why cannot this be done at night, or even when there is less traffic? Doing it in peak hour is just not done. As usual there is no planning.”
Sathish Nair
Another, IT engineer and a civic activist who travels 35 km everyday one way tells us”White Topping work on Bengaluru Roads could have been planned in a better sensible way. The current ongoing work is affecting me very badly in terms of travel times to work and back home getting longer, my productivity at work being impacted as I’m spending too much of my time to reach office, every day I have to explore new routes to avoid the white topping junctions on the stretch that I travel.”
