A worker fills up potholes on a city road on Sunday

With BMC's self-imposed deadline to repair all potholes in Mumbai getting over on Monday, civic road-repair teams have since Saturday been working round-the-clock to fill pending potholes. An official from the civic roads department said the BMC would be able to repair the pending potholes by Monday, a deadline set by municipal commissioner Ajoy Mehta earlier last month.

While the civic body had over a month to complete the work on fixing potholes in the city, work began on a massive footing only by Friday to avoid more flak from citizens, even as the civic body lodged a complaint against MNS corporators Sandeep Deshpande and Santosh Dhuri at the Shivaji Park police station.

While the latest figure on the number of potholes indicates that there are only 35 potholes on the city streets, the roads department itself begs to differ. A civic official from the department said, “Those are only the reported potholes, there are more on the street. This number indicates the number of complaints we have received from citizens. There can be unreported potholes on the streets. However, our men are working round-the-clock, as a dry spell is going on now.”

Meanwhile, the department has blamed the incessant rain, for its inability to fix potholes before Friday. The official quoted above said, “We took about 50 tonnes of material to fix potholes on Ranade Road three nights ago. As soon as we were done with work, it rained heavily, even though only for a few minutes. All our work went down the drain.\"

Meanwhile, the roads department has now sought help from the traffic police to divert traffic on some roads dotted with large number of potholes, while workers repair them, so as to enhance the speed of the work being carried out.”