MC has floated another mega tender worth Rs 8,614 crore for the third phase of its ambitious road concretisation project, covering stretches across the island city, eastern and western suburbs.
These remaining portions will now be covered to ensure uniform concretisation, a senior civic official involved in the project said.
Side strips refer to portions of roads that were left out during earlier concretisation works, when the entire stretch from kerb to kerb was not taken up.
A Samajwadi Party MLA said that BMC must bring in a white paper on the earlier two phases before starting work on the new phase. Also, the city and its residents have already borne up too much with dug-up roads over the past four years and this repeated digging needs to stop,” he said. “How successful these past works which were taken up have been needs to be understood. In many cases, contractors have also been penalised heftily.
With the third phase, BMC aims to achieve 100% concretisation of Mumbai’s roads. The tendering process is expected to be completed by December this year, with work likely to commence in January 2027, officials said. The ambitious road concretisation programme was initiated in 2022 after then chief minister Eknath Shinde directed the municipal administration, headed by then commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal, to explore concretising all city roads to address Mumbai’s perennial pothole problem. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the first phase of the concretisation programme in January 2023. Currently, work under the first two phases, covering a combined 717 km of roads across Mumbai, is underway. BMC aims to complete one phase by December this year and the second by May 2027. Mumbai has a road network of 2,000 km and over 1,333 km of roads have been concretised so far, including major arteries such as Aarey Road, Andheri-Kurla Link Road, Narayan Dabholkar Marg and stretches connecting Navy Nagar to Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg.
A BMC official said, “The concretised roads have helped reduce the recurrence of potholes to some extent. The civic body is also carrying out periodic inspections and monitoring of completed stretches to assess their condition and ensure that defects are addressed.”