Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) plans to asphalt close to 3,000 km of roads in Bengaluru over the course of next five months. According to a report in Deccan Herald, BS Prahlad, engineer-in-chief of BBMP said that they plan to asphalt 427 km of arterial roads in the next 90 dry days.
Prahlad cited the most recent affidavit provided to the High Court in this regard and added that BBMP has enough funds to completely tar 2,500 kilometres of ward roads but lacked the funding to repair all bad roads.
BBMP will use its own batch-mix asphalt plant which will be used to fill the potholes. A batch-mix asphalt plant combines aggregates, bitumen, and binder material in a central mixer in preset ratios and at predetermined temperatures. Different batch sizes of hot mix asphalt are produced at a batch mix plant.
He further said that the ward engineers have been instructed to provide the total number of potholes found and filled. “The information is accessible on our website," he said. According to Prahlad, BBMP follows the Indian Roads Congress guidelines. The Indian Roads Congress (IRC) is the apex body of highway engineers in the country. IRC has laid down various guidelines as per international best practices, which are specified by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).
This comes after the High Court of Karnataka on November 2 ordered the Chief Engineer of the National Highways Authority of India's (NHAI) Karnataka division, to inspect the pothole filling, road repair, and road resurfacing projects the BBMP has been carrying out in various areas of the city.