Abusive calls force BMC to withdraw advertisements

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Friday informed the Bombay high court that it has decided to withdraw the advertisements displaying the mobile numbers of its engineers for people to lodge complaints of potholes as the officers have been hounded with “abusive” phone calls.

BMC counsel Anil Sakhare told a division bench of Justices S.M. Kemkar and M.S. Karnik that it will now hand out new mobile phones and SIM cards and only these numbers will be advertised and used to receive complaints.

On July 15 this year, HC had directed BMC to publish the numbers of the road engineers of each municipal ward. The direction had come after the court was informed that BMC’s web-based app MCGM 24x7 was not working and the people had no other means to get their complaints registered.

Mr Sakhare told HC that people had been calling the road engineers and abusing them. To this, the bench observed that “people must be getting frustrated after driving through long stretches of roads riddled with potholes and hence making those heated calls”.

Mr Sakhare also informed the bench that in compliance with its previous orders, BMC had shortlisted three firms to supply “better quality of road repair material”.

Meanwhile, the state government informed the bench that since the last hearing in court, it had filled up 3,247 potholes on the Eastern and Western Expressway Highways and 137 more potholes remained to be repaired on both the highways.