It is disheartening to see that the Panjim city roads are being dug up for fixing the drain gutters with cemented slabs, which are left open for a quite long time by the roadside, for the purpose of storm water discharging into River Mandovi.
With this exercise of digging, they have come across everywhere a bunch of cables running into it, which belongs to various departments and are mixed up badly. When the fault occurs in any of these cables time and again, the slabs will be lifted to pin point the cable fault, thereby spreading the slabs on the roads will be seen again. The situation is merry go round all over again. The city’s look will be again back to square one and never ending.
Surely, the city fathers are to be blamed as the Smart City goal will never be achieved. I noticed this exercise of laying the cables has no marking and are dumped into the drain in haphazardly manner. Moreover, this work should have been carried out prior to the monsoon. I see the engineers from the Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP), PWD and staff from the Smart City Mission, have no coordination among themselves and surely this will result into a failure.
Recently, the news report of executing the work of St Inez Creek is totally messed up for months together and the traffic is paralysed at the bridge, which is under renovation and Mayor, who is supposed to supervise could not achieve the results. Definitely, the government is responsible for this mess as the traffic at this bridge is stopped for months together. There are hundreds of such digging going on in the city and the roads with potholes all over still exist.
The asphalting of roads are being done very badly and every time their height is increased thus the levelling of water flow is affected and creating inundation of road at certain areas of Panjim. Entrance of many houses in Panjim city is gone low compared to the road height. Rain water enters due to low height in some of the houses. There is no proper level for the rain water to flow into the river.
One side, the flow is blocked near the Pergola, at the beach side, where a sort of garden has come up to confuse the public. This way, which side the rain water will go? It is blocked. Other side, it is supposed to go upto the indoor stadium, but due to no proper level, there is a back flow and with small showers the whole area at this Miramar circle gets inundated. Now, this area is getting crowded with hundreds of tourists, buses and private cars. Just wait upto December, this area is going to face severe traffic problems.
I could just cite only three areas in Panjim, which are very badly affected for the citizens of Panjim on account of digging.
Many months before the rains, there were pipes projecting in the air, near the Bal Bhavan as the authorities were confused about the execution of work which they didn’t know which direction the flow should go. Now, they have joined this gutter from other side of the tree and the digging has started to confuse the traffic. Still, I have a doubt where the storm water will go easily. Engineers definitely are in dilemma. We have to wait for next monsoon to see the results.
