Navelim’s a growing urban village and supports traffic getting inside and outside of Margao. Traffic that commutes from Pernem to Canacona and crossing across Goa and through the villages of Assolna, Chinchinim, Velim, Pali, Balli, Betul, Cuncolim, Avedem, Sirlim, Deussa, Canacona and Cottigao.
The increasing traffic in Navelim has forced the government to raze down homes and compound walls and extend the National Highway. Delayed work and improper planning besides protests by Navelkars of the land filing and destruction of fields is one of the problems of the highway expansion. But the bigger problem lies in the PWD’s casualness of not fixing the roads and its potholes and water logging.
Vigilant Navelim and Khareband residents’ Facebook posts point out at how the potholes outside the Navelim church is because of a lacklustre soling and asphalting job done by the PWD. So bad is the quality of road constructions that in a pothole visible is a mobile network cable which is not even laid 2 inches below the road surface.
Sanjay Dessai in his Facebook posts shows how a mobile network cable protruding out of the asphalt across the highway has created a sling shot off on to the road and can be a real danger to scooterists.
“Going to Rosary College is a nightmare between avoiding buses, people crossing, because the traffic cops can’t get people to use the subway, and avoiding potholes. Everything on Navelim’s highways is so bad. Not to forget the abandoned highway works which leaves the highway clogged and can’t differentiate between road, ditch and a pothole,” asserted Albert Costa who goes to college daily.
Another major issue is one side of the flyover wherein a recent excavation by another mobile company has left a deep hole in the road along the hard shoulder just at the landing of the flyover making it super dangerous for commuters.
“The absence of inlet pipes from the road to the covered gutter turned sidewalk means that the rain water stays on the road just at the start of the flyover on the Margao end and deep beneath those water clogged roads is a massive pothole and a slippery rubber pipe left behind by some mobile network company which makes the road dangerous,” pointed out Sridhar Dessai, a daily Margao-Khotigao commuter.
Complaint letters have been sent but the PWD department seems to have done nothing much to the woes of these bad roads built and maintained by the PWD and GSIDC.
