With the pre-monsoon showers having arrived in Bengaluru, traffic woes and complaints about damaged roads are on the rise. To handle the complaints, the BBMP has set up multiple control rooms to address.
Earlier this month the BBMP set up a total of 61 control rooms in the city, in addition to 10 full-time help centers. People can call on the numbers 6 am to 6 pm and lodge complaints about potholes, sewage blocks, leaking pipelines and water-logging between.
In September, after a woman died after falling in to a pothole, BBMP had promised to repair the pothole-ridden roads by November 2015. Six months since, complaints are still pouring in.
BBMP engineer-in-chief MR Venkatesh said that that the complaints all except water-logging would be taken care of within 24 hours. He said that water-logging required more time to sort out.
“We are just being accessible to the people as there are more complaints coming in every day. Once the complaint is lodged, we will attend to it within 24 hour.The caller needs to give the problem and the location. There are complaints about major roads, especially from the Mysore road stretch.”
He also said that they have been receiving complaints from people travelling on roads in central business district too.
Asked about water-logging on TenderSURE roads, Venkatesh said that the mayor had visited Cunningham Road and Vittal Mallya Road where he received many complaints of water-logging after heavy rain on Wednesday. Mayor MN Manjunath Reddy had said he would take a decision, Venkatesh added.
"For the time being we have asked TenderSURE to fastrack the work so that the roads are usable before the monsoon sets in," he said.
Sabarinath, who works at a medical store on St. Marks road off Richmond road, said that after it rained on Wednesday, motorists were greatly inconvenienced. "Water had stagnated on the whole stretch and there was a huge traffic block. Even the tiles fixed are slippery," said Sabarinath adding that this had never happened before the remodelling of the road.
"The road only looks neat and fancy from outside but the truth is that there are many problems. It is basic knowledge for engineers to angle the road properly. The drains are made on the higher level. So naturally there will be water logging. Previously the roads were designed very well. There would be no place where one would find stagnating water," he said.
Manjunath said that the BBMP is preparing for the monsoon and on Saturday, it will conduct clean-up drives, which will include clearing fallen trees.