Mayor starts road repairs with discretionary funds

HMC Works and Services Dept officials elude inquiry over poor construction of roads

HYDERABAD:

Some of the roads built, rehabilitated or widened in Hyderabad a year or two ago, have developed potholes, bumps and holistically a bad road surface.

Mayor Kashif Ali Shoro in October, 2023, had written to Works and Services Department to conduct inquiry which was supposed to be followed by urgent repair works. However, after failing to elicit a response from the officers of the department concerned, the mayor has ordered patchwork on these roads this week from his own funds.

The mayor had sought probe over three specific roads. One of these roads is a dual carriageway - Naseem Nagar Road in Qasimabad - with flourishing markets on its either sides. The other two roads connect thickly populated residential areas with a main road which connects Hyderabad with Jamshoro district. These roads became damaged some months after completion of the civil works.

On Mayor's prodding, a week later Deputy Commissioner Tariq Qureshi also asked the department's executive engineer (XEn) in Hyderabad to start an inquiry. Subsequently, Director General Monitoring Works and Services Department on December 4, 2023, asked the XEn for the inquiry on an urgent basis, giving reference of the mayor's correspondence.

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He asked the XEn to provide details like PC-I, administrative approval, work orders, technical sanctions, released bills and incumbency of the officers during whose stints those projects were executed. "The requisite documents with attested photocopies were required by this office but you failed to submit the same," the DG wrote in another correspondence over two months later on February 9.

On February 21, the DC once again raised the same issue in writing with the XEn. "The XEn has completely ignored all directions to conduct inquiry over the poor construction works on these roads," the mayor said in a statement on Wednesday.

In 2022, a wide green belt on Naseem Nagar road was razed so that the dual carriageway could be widened. With the belt, the road with dozens of commercial plazas and tens of housing schemes became shorn of its entire green cover. The mayor also started a tree plantation drive on this road on February 26.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 29^th, 2024.