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• Bitumen roads cost Rs 200 per sq m, last
a year or less
• Mastic asphalt roads cost Rs 400 per sq
m, last eight years
• Concrete roads cost Rs 2,000 per sq m,
last 25 years
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Perturbed by the increasing pressure from the judiciary and paucity of funds, mayor Subrata Mukherjee is exploring new ways of improving the condition of city roads.
The mayor wants to discuss with chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee a proposal to take a Rs 1,000-crore soft loan for making the city roads durable. He will meet Bhattacharjee next week.
The mayor believes there are two ways open before the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) to avoid criticism from all quarters ? replace the bituminous topcoat of the major city roads with mastic asphalt or concretise the main thoroughfares.
?And in either case, we need money, money and, once again, money,? Mukherjee said.
A sum of Rs 1,000 crore is needed to cover with mastic asphalt 700 km of the 1,500-km roads in the city. The CMC currently spends Rs 16 crore annually on road repair, and even if the entire amount is spent on mastic asphalt, it will take 70 years to cover 700 km of roads, the mayor said.
Joint ventures with private companies or industrial houses is not an option, as there is no scope for collection of toll taxes on city roads.
Thus, the money can either be obtained from the government, if it agrees to share a portion of the motor vehicle?s tax, or from international agencies like the Asian Development Bank (ADB) or World Bank, and financial agencies of countries like Japan and Germany, as a soft loan.
Shaktibrata Ghosh, officer on special duty to the mayor, said a Japan-based financial agency had expressed its desire to be involved in the city?s infrastructure development.
Mayoral council member (roads) Anup Chatterjee said: ?The CMC has already taken a loan of Rs 1,245 crore from the ADB for the Calcutta environment improvement project. It is unfortunate that development of city roads was dropped from the list of priorities for the project.?
He argued that since the state government had introduced user charges for motorists on Vidyasagar Setu and Durgapur Expressway, it cannot turn down a proposal to levy charges on vehicle-owners for use of city roads.
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