Mumbai's Annual Pothole Crisis: A Deadly Mix Of Corruption, Neglect And Failed Promises

This monsoon in Mumbai is no different from many previous seasons in one respect: thousands of potholes on the city’s roads. As it happens every year, potholes appear on the roads, including on the city’s arterial roads, leading to not only delays and disruptions in the movement of traffic but also the loss of innocent lives.

This is unequivocally unpardonable. Thousands of crores have been spent in the past decade to improve the condition of the nearly 2,000 km road length, but the problem of potholes persists. This has to do with the technology adopted to both lay the roads and manage their maintenance through different seasons.

Indeed, the usage of roads, including by heavy vehicles, is extremely high, but that’s no excuse for millions of commuters in the city to negotiate the pothole hazard every monsoon.

According to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s data, a massive 6,758 potholes were reported this year in only six weeks from June to mid-July—an increase of 8 per cent over the same period last year. This surge has happened despite the civic body claiming that nearly half of the road length has been concretised, which should have decreased the number of potholes.

Every pothole is a potential accident spot. Surely, the BMC is acutely aware of this life-taking hazard. Over the years, it has put in place mechanisms for Mumbaikars to register pothole complaints online and deployed its engineers across civic wards to carry out regular inspections.

Where potholes are reported or found, remedial action with mastic material is taken, but, more often than not, it is a temporary salve till the next big rainfall loosens the top layer. This is not a solution.

The continuing malaise points to factors that are within the remit of the BMC or the Maharashtra government that has been administering the civic body for over three years—multiple agencies in charge of roads, road contracts monopolised by a cartel of contractors, tenders of inflated amounts issued and awarded, the BMC’s oversight and inspection of the work negligible, and the connivance and nexus between officials and contractors brought out in court cases over the years, but the blacklisted contractors are still finding ways to bag new contracts.

A chargesheet in one of the many cases showed, in 2016, that a contractor building or repairing 11 roads had syphoned off Rs 8.5 crore. Pothole-related deaths evoke shock but little meaningful action.

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How utterly shameful it is that the city, which aspires to be on the list of the world’s sought-after international cities and prides itself on constructing roads in the Arabian Sea, cannot seem to get its basic roads right. This is nothing but deep-rooted corruption and a shocking lack of political will.