I travel daily between Borivali and Vikhroli. The travel time ideally is 50 mins, but it takes me anything between 1 hr 30 mins till 3 hrs to reach one way. Apart from burning a hole in my pocket by the way of petrol bills, I also have to pay medical bills to take care of my Back. Thanks to BMC/MMRDA, they have ensured that doctors mint money from hapless people traveling daily on the Mumbai roads.
No matter what you do, no one can build a road which lasts a monsoon, atleast in Mumbai. We are the superpower of the future and a great economy, a great market, but we just cannot take care of our roads. This is really patheric, and the situation seems to be getting worse.
I recently visited Pune and some of the roads there were as smooth as silk, but Mumbai still has a way to go. The problem seems to be inadequate inspection or review or contractual obligations on the contractors who do a bad-worse job of laying the road. Even the most recent roads like the Concrete ones have to be pathched which smells of corruption in the work. Fathom this, for the last 5 years I have seen a partivular stretch on the highway being relaid and relaid and patched, but there is no permanent solution. There is no one to review the work done, and after a shoddy job, the problem still persists.
There is also a lack of seeing the root cause and the agencies (for that matter any government agency) treat the symptoms. Like for example, one of the stretches has water logged on it every day even if there is no monsoon, as a result the patch is always damaged and filled with potholes. Some drain water is accumilating there. So I have seen officials remove the water, repair the road and go away, to come again and do the same activity repeatedly.
There is a serious deficiency of project management principles being applied to the road projects. I see this as a lack of educations of our corporators and law makers, who come from any background and make decisions which do not match their skillsets.
Its time we should have horses for courses. Unless we have qualified people managing different posts, I think this is going to continue till my grandchild becomes a grandfather.
Cheers
