DH Insight | Cutting corners: Urban roads suffer due to neglect

Bengaluru’s traffic cops simply roll up their sleeves and fill potholes themselves. Then, they post the pictures on their social media handles, secretly hoping for some systemic action.

Bengaluru: What do Bengaluru’s traffic cops do when they see a pothole obstructing the smooth flow of traffic?

They simply roll up their sleeves and fill the potholes themselves. Then, they post the pictures on their social media handles, secretly hoping for some systemic action. Regular commuters of the Outer Ring Road in Bengaluru might be familiar with the sight of traffic cops fixing potholes.

A senior traffic police officer in Bengaluru explains why they do it: “We are the immediate responders. We cannot wait for others to come in. If a pothole is causing a traffic issue, we will stop a concrete mixer and request the driver to pour some concrete into the pothole, using which we level the road,” he says.

Where do they get the funds? From nowhere.

“We do not have funds for this because fixing potholes is not under our scope of work. It is an act of goodwill and everyone will be able to use the road better for some time,” he adds.

Bengaluru's roads have developed new potholes after the city experienced sporadic and incessant rains in the last few months. The city administration, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), has also launched an app to geo-tag potholes and taken up pothole-filling work on a war footing —a band-aid solution to a perennial problem.

Not just Bengaluru — be it Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, or Thiruvananthapuram, the pothole problem is omnipresent. Urban roads face similar issues across cities: narrow roads, potholes, flooding during rains, traffic jams and more. Municipal corporations frequently lose money in piecemeal solutions, while the will to fix the problem seems lacking.

Built in 1972, Pune’s 2.5 km-long Jangli Maharaj Road has seen no potholes until now — this is the only such road in Pune to date, which is also considered a civil engineering marvel and the gold standard for quality road work.

In contrast, the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link — also named Atal Setu— developed cracks at three locations on the approach ramp at the Navi Mumbai end. Meanwhile, in the city, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), recorded and repaired 16,162 potholes between June 1 and August 14.

"Delhi has a pronounced class difference. While areas where elite citizens live are well-maintained, most other areas are ignored. Areas like Anand Vihar or Mehrauli are worse," says Suniti (name changed), a Delhi resident.

Three municipalities govern roads in Delhi and some roads are maintained by the state Public Works Department (PWD). Most roads in central Delhi, which see VIP movements daily, are free of potholes. However, the roads in residential areas have water logs and potholes.

Why do roads break?

According to Ratnakara Reddy K B, a Bengaluru-based urban transport expert, regardless of the city's geography and temperature, the road's water drainage system is integral to maintaining roads.

Road quality stats

“Cities in India lack comprehensive stormwater plans. All water flows on the carriageway, leading to problems,” he adds.

Digging up roads for other utilities like water and sewage contributes to water stagnation and seepage, stripping the asphalt from the aggregate and leading to potholes, says Vivek Menon, a registered professional engineer, State of Texas, USA, and a member at the Center for infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation & Urban Planning (CiSTUP), IISc, Bengaluru.

Another contributor to poor-quality roads is the deficiency of asphalt in the mix, the binding agent in roads.

When the percentage of asphalt, an expensive component, is reduced, the road falls apart faster. Ideally, 5.5% of the entire mix by volume needs to be asphalt, says Menon. 

Patchwork for road repair without proper binding agents, such as tack coat, will only be a temporary fix. “Ideally, a pothole should be cut out to a square or rectangle up to the base layer, which is the Wet Mix Macadam (WMM) and refilled and compacted with WMM and Bituminous Concrete (BC),” he says.

A senior scientist from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, explains that a problem particularly observed in Karnataka is the overlaying and not re-laying roads. “We are not going to the base level to remove the problem and stabilise the bottom layers. Until we do that, the problems will remain,” he explained.

Jayaram Venkatesan of Arappor Iyakkam, an anti-corruption NGO based in Chennai, explains, “If a new road is laid on the existing one without the old one being milled, it raises the height of the road, and pushes houses to a lower level. Flooding of houses is one problem due to non-milling. It obstructs the current design of the stormwater drain, upsetting the entire system.” 

Another issue is sinkholes on city roads. Bengaluru has witnessed many sinkholes where roads have even caved in. “This happens when the roads are laid on existing ones without being removed. The tree stumps or other materials under the road can compress and cause sinkholes,” says Ratnakara Reddy.

Coordination

Lack of coordination between agencies poses a major challenge for roads. Take, for example, roads in Thiruvananthapuram. Owing to a lack of coordination among various agencies like the Kerala Water Authority, the local bodies, and the Public Works Department, even newly-tarred roads are often dug within days after the work is completed.

In Chennai and Bengaluru, the construction of metro rail tracks has caused many roads to be barricaded partially or dug up, causing other cascading problems. Thiruvananthapuram is witnessing major road works as part of the centrally funded Smart City project, which has resulted in the closure of many major roads.

The challenge here is coordination between multiple agencies responsible for working simultaneously for metro, sewage, and gas systems. “Since city streets cannot collect a toll, the only option is for the state to prioritise funding for urban metropolises like Bengaluru and supplement the funding coming from the BBMP,” says Menon.

In cities like Bengaluru, multi-agency coordination happens through letters. “However, bustling, dense cities like Bengaluru are also always dealing with everyday uncertainties alongside the need to constantly overhaul service infrastructure. This means a lot of departments and agencies are constantly planning, or at short notice, attending to issues on, above or below the road surface, which creates a different set of challenges,” says Dhawal Ashar, head of  Sustainable Cities and Transport, World Resource Institute, India.

“We surely need better coordination, but dealing with everyday uncertainties and emergencies can be challenging for the agencies, too. One way to manage this challenge is to create a management system that logs each agencies or departments’ work at any particular location in one place and periodically audit and examine the potential for a more optimised approach to infrastructure service planning and management,” adds Ashar.

Road maintenance

In the absence of local road standards, Indian Roads Congress (IRC) guidelines and codes apply across all cities.

According to the most recent revision of the IRC’s ‘Code of Practice for the Maintenance of Bituminous Roads’, timely maintenance of bituminous roads, commonly understood as asphalt roads, is crucial to reduce vehicle operation costs, reduce pollution due to reduced fuel consumption, to save the budgetary expenditure of restoration or reconstruction of roads, reduce crash rate, and to keep roads traffic worthy in all weather conditions.

“Timely and regular maintenance of roads have been known to provide an economical rate of return as high as 15 to 20% depending on the category of road and traffic volume. Moreover, it helps defer the demand for rehabilitation which otherwise is far costlier than preventive maintenance,” reads section 3.2 of the code.

Roads laid and maintained by the state highways department and those belonging to the national highways are generally good. Though many state highways lack dividers due to the nature of the path, they are generally considered safe as they are maintained well. Arterial and main roads are also generally well maintained in most cities, while interior roads cry for attention. 

When the crowd is vocal and powerful, the governments take an interest in protecting their interests. For example, the Tamil Nadu government takes extra care in maintaining roads in industrial corridors across the state. Tamil Nadu has the largest number of factories in the country. 

Ashar says that the best form of road maintenance globally is ‘preventive maintenance’, where pavement distress is dealt with at a very early stage of its occurrence, “something that Indian cities will largely benefit by adopting.”

Experts feel budget allocation is inadequate for roads, pointing to corruption in the system. “It is high time that city corporations allocate budgets to maintain the roads. It is an everyday process and needs allocation,” says Reddy.

"Tenders for roads awarded to the contractor have loopholes and thus the full tender cost never gets utilised for road construction. This results in poor quality. Pressure of top hierarchy within the system leads to not following standards of technical design,” says Aditya Chawande, a Pune-based urban transport planner, working for Parisara, an NGO.

This is a common complaint in all cities. Activists allege that irrespective of parties, political forces are hand in glove with contractors as they receive ‘cuts’ for road work tenders.

“At the state-level, government engineers make 'compromises' with the road budget. In most cases, budget allocation for roads is always the least priority,” says VVS Reddy, a Hyderabad-based social activist who works on road safety.

“The only way to improve roads in cities is to have participatory policies and make the contractors follow non-negotiable norms,” says Chawande. "The governments must employ technical experts, transport planners, urban designers and engineers who are well aware of design standards," he adds.

City roads are looked after by city municipalities. “Check the qualification of road engineering staff in any municipality. They lack the required qualifications and expertise. How do we expect quality from the work they supervise?” he asks.

Solutions

In Mumbai, the BMC has used various technologies to fix potholes, such as jet patching machine technology, Austrian and Israeli asphalt mix, rapid hardening concrete, and reactive asphalt. Ahead of the monsoon outbreak, the BMC mainly uses hot mix asphalt. Additionally, hot mix and cold mix technologies are traditional for potholes. Cold mix asphalt is used if potholes are repaired while it is raining. 

The BMC also tests the concrete road works in Mumbai to ensure quality. A circular sample section of the cement-concrete roads at Manjrekarwadi Marg in Andheri and Dixit Marg in Vile Parle was cut using a machine and sent to the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) for testing its strength and ensure that the works are done in a technically correct manner.

“The materials used for the road works were tested on various criteria like ratio, durability, homogeneity, load-bearing to weed out poor quality work,” an official says, adding that this would be a strong message to the contractors and their supervisors. 

Ashar notes that Indian city streets are rapidly moving from asphalt to concrete, mainly because concrete is more durable, less prone to potholes, and offers a longer-lasting solution for smooth vehicular movement. 

“Longer service life of the concrete roads may perhaps justify the higher costs as compared to asphalt but concrete roads need to be examined through a few different lenses too. Long-lasting also means very rigid and therefore harder to change, which means we really need to carefully design each element of the road to equitably cater to every road user before we pave the road with concrete, or else we risk having to live with a problem for a much longer time,” he says.

Since concrete is a non-permeable material, water falling on the road will have to be dealt through a proper drainage network. “If we are going to concrete most roads or in the case of Bengaluru, white-top them, then it is crucial to think about a more holistic flood management approach that does not rely entirely on concrete lined drains, but also creates sponge infrastructure that can absorb water. It is also pertinent to experiment with paving materials that can absorb some amount of the water and not let it all run-off,” he adds.

In Kerala, contractors are responsible for ensuring the quality of roads for a stipulated period of time, failing which they could lose their security deposit. The Kerala Public Works department also decided in 2022 to display boards with the names and contact details of contractors and engineers concerned on roads once the maintenance work was over.

A senior official of the Kerala Road Fund Board says the frequent government instructions have improved coordination among various agencies, thereby minimising the instances of newly tarred roads being dug again. A minimum guarantee period also ensures the quality of road works. All these terms exist in every city as part of the tender conditions but are rarely followed.

Some lessons to take from the US in terms of road quality and maintenance include proper road classification and design criteria, proper drainage systems, utility corridors, reduction of road cutting, use of concrete versus asphalt in high-traffic areas, and good lane geometry, including lane balance and lane continuity at junctions, explains Menon.

A decade ago, Bengaluru started a geo-tagged road history project, marking every road in Bengaluru and detailing the work undertaken on it. This was shelved later for unknown reasons. It is not present in any other city in India as well. “We do not have a road maintenance management system or pavement management system. Every major city in the world uses technology to fix issues, but we do not,” says Reddy.

(With inputs from Arjun Raghunath in Thiruvananthapuram, ETB Sivapriyan in Chennai, Mrityunjay Bose in Mumbai, SNV Sudhir in Hyderabad)