Kolkata Municipal Corporation has identified several major roads for immediate repairs ahead of Durga Puja, with dedicated teams expected to work overnight and complete the current phase by October 8. The move follows complaints about damaged roads across the city and a request from Kolkata Police to address stretches affecting traffic movement before the festival rush.
The roads listed by senior KMC officials include EM Bypass, Alipore Road, Burdwan Road and stretches of Gurusaday Road, Circular Garden Reach, Diamond Harbour Road and Central Avenue. Police officers have separately flagged the stretch between Kidderpore Road and Remount Road in the port area, along with the approach to Bijon Setu, as requiring urgent attention.
KMC officials said repair work would be carried out at night to reduce disruption to traffic. “We know the stretches that need repair. Our workers and machinery will move in close to midnight, and the road repair will continue throughout the night,” a civic official said on Monday.
The civic body has formed dedicated teams for the work and directed senior road engineers to share photographs of repair activities along with the latitude and longitude of each site. The information is intended to allow real-time assessment of work across the affected locations.
Some repairs will have to wait until underground water-related work is completed. The stretch between Hazra and Rashbehari on SP Mukherjee Road, which officials said has multiple craters, will be taken up after the underground water dispersal system is fixed. KMC also identified an underground water leak near the crossing of Ballygunge Circular Road and AJC Bose Road.
The civic body attributed the delayed start of thorough repairs to unusually heavy rain in September. Bituminous surfacing is difficult on wet roads, and officials said much of the immediate work would therefore involve patchwork repairs. A senior KMC official said the hot-mix plant had been placed on emergency mode to meet the October 8 target.
“Most of the repairs will be patchwork for now,” the official said, adding that the city’s roadwork schedule had been affected by prolonged rainfall. Some potholes had already been filled with bricks and covered with a layer of bitumen hotmix.
Rainfall recorded at Alipore, Kolkata’s official rain gauge, reached 547.9mm between September 1 and 25. The 30-year average for the same period, based on readings from 1990, is 265.2mm, making this year’s rainfall more than twice the normal level.
Kolkata Police officers overseeing traffic management said they had shared a list of at least six key roads with the KMC and requested repairs at the earliest. The repairs are being undertaken ahead of Durga Puja, when movement across the city increases sharply and damaged road surfaces can create additional traffic and safety problems.
The roadwork is scheduled to be completed by October 8, ahead of the October 10 deadline set by chief minister Suvendu Adhikari for repairs before Durga Puja.
