Girish's Blog

My May 19 post had talked about Mumbai’s roads crumbling and flooding at different points in the city due to the shoddy and lethargic work being carried out by the BMC through its gravy train contractors. Well, yesterday was the first day of continuous rains, from light to heavy and guess what we had to go through the agony of bad and terribly congested roads due to water logging and potholes. Potholes have already started developing on the western express highway from Bandra onwards, the paver blocks have sunk and in places have come out leaving gaping holes which when underwater could cause serious damage to two wheelers and their riders. The tragedy of all this is we know it is going to happen, but we have BMC officials mouthing age old platitudes while twiddling their thumbs. We have a Municipal Commissioner who is more keen on trying to control the media rather than controlling and putting in line a system which rewards performance rather than corruption – I mean the Rs. 1000 cror...

Last year just before the onset of the monsoon (methinks it was around June 5 or so), the BMC in its infinite wisdom decided to scrape off almost the entire top layer of the Vakola flyover. In fact the contractors had just finished the top layer about four months before it got scraped off. So a perfectly good road was made un-motorable because of some insane order being given by some stupid mandarin sitting in the BMC. That bad stretch got completely damaged by the end of the monsoon creating huge traffic jams which otherwise would not have been there. In fact the repair job was completed just about a month back – you drive over the flyover now and you will realize that India is probably the only country in the world where you can have undulating layers on a bridge, making the entire ride a nice and bumpy one. I have a theory that the guys sitting in BMC and the contractors together have got a deal going with the motor garages for sending them a regular stream of customers with vehicle...