PRATIK PARAB
NAVELIM: Roads in Navelim, especially the ones in the Davorlim area and areas where the work of sewerage scheme connection is underway, are in an absolute bad shape.
The bureaucratic failure to mandate the contractor to repair the road and also to monitor the same has been absent. The people are angry and want a solution. But the PWD Roads Division says that the road will be repaired only after the next monsoon season.
The road between the Powerhouse junction and right up to the Ramnagari-Nessai junction, mostly falling under the Navelim Constituency, has gone from bad to worse due to constant digging up of roads for sewerage connections, water pipelines, and several other works.
What’s more, even even after a moratorium on digging was put in place; it did not stop various agencies from digging the road or restoring the road back to its original condition.
Right now, there appears to be a bombardment of agencies, attacking the road. In addition, there are works of sewerage connections, which include home connections and cross-connections to the manholes.
However, only 8 connections have been installed in Davorlim and applications for over 120 are pending to be executed. But there are hardly any takers as people find the Rs 5,000 cost for these connections expensive.
But the Government through the contractor reportedly spends at least one lakh rupees on the home connections, of which only Rs 5,000 is taken from the beneficiaries. The government is being urged to waive off those charges too. But this will only delay completion of these works since there are no buffer finds on the coffers to complete these works.
In another matter, there is work of connecting a gas pipeline to houses that is also pending. Clearly, there’s a lot of digging still left to be done.
Speaking on these issues, the Managing Director of Sewerage Corporation, P B Serdalkar said, “We have released connections for the applications we have received. We will release the connections and by end of December, we will do road cutting and connect.”
The Executive Engineer of PWD, Prasad Panadikar, added that there are hundred or 200 connections that are to be given. “We will do one coat of tarring after the connections are completed even after January-end. However, we will do a final coat only after the next monsoon, as the connections have to settle”.
But each agency works in isolation with no sharing of data. The PWD Principal Chief Engineer Uttam Parsekar further pointed out that ‘the entire data of the works undertaken and supposed to be executed by the Sewerage Corporation is solely with the Corporation.’
Notwithstanding the much needed multi-agency inspection that was conducted last week, there is little hope that the digging and damage will be stopped anytime soon.
