Kolkata: Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will have to step up road repairs across the city after incessant rain left craters and damaged stretches of several major thoroughfares.A KMC roads department official said potholes and craters had surfaced on stretches of a majority of the city’s roads following the recent downpour.According to KMC administrator Smita Pandey, the civic body has identified 76 roads that require repairs, of which work on 31 has already been completed. “Rest assured, we will wrap up repairs on all major thoroughfares before the Puja,” Pandey said on Tuesday.At the meeting with the Durga Puja organisers on Monday, chief secretary Manoj Kumar Agarwal said that CM Suvendu Adhikari has set an Oct 10 deadline for KMC to repair all broken roads.KMC has procured two new milling machines to scrape off the top bituminous layer of roads, sources in the civic body said. The civic now has seven milling machines in its possession, six of them larger ones and one smaller machine.Pandey was present at a symbolic launch of the use of the two new milling machines at Shyambazar five-point crossing on Tuesday night. “The machines will be used to scrape off undulated portions of stretches of Bhupen Bose Avenue. They will be deployed with more frequency after Durga Puja. We do not have enough time in hand to flatten large stretches of undulated roads before Durga Puja,” said an official.The new machines, with 1-metre-wide scraper blades, can be used on arterial roads as well.Multiple roads in Kolkata — Central Avenue, Rawdon Street, Loudon Street, Jawaharlal Nehru Road, Rashbehari Avenue, among others — have long stretches of undulated surface. Such roads are a pain particularly for those riding two-wheelers. Long stretches of EM Bypass also have undulated stretches.
