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Estimates for road repair revised

Staff Reporter

Owing to excessive delay in execution of underground drainage scheme

KARUR: The Karur Municipal Council has given its nod for an upward revision of estimates for road repair work in the town. The excess amount sanctioned was Rs. 82.08 lakh.

This was entirely due to excessive delay in the execution of the underground drainage scheme, which has come in for all round criticism.

Originally, an amount of Rs. 236 lakh was sanctioned for undertaking road repair work in areas where the earth was dug up for the drainage scheme. Since the scheme was implemented in all the 36 wards of the municipality, and all of the 59.19 km stretch of roads under the Karur Municipal limits were to gain from that allocation. Work was split into 25 packages and tenders were then called for carrying out repair works in the first phase for six packages.

The underground drainage scheme, implemented under the National River Conservation Plan, started in September 2003 and should have ended by December 2005. But due to "various reasons'' the project overran the time schedule and even now has not been brought to public use fully.

In areas where the scheme has seen a substantial progress, especially in wards 1 to 13, road repair work were sought to be carried out, and the six packages fell in those areas. The successful bidders for the rest of the works in wards 14 to 36 sought cancellation of their agreement and also refund of their tender deposit. It is in those circumstances that the revised estimates for the remaining packages of road repairs were placed before the council during its urgent meeting on Friday. The council after a pretty quick deliberation, decided on an upward revision of the estimates for the balance part of road repair works in wards 14 to 36.

From the originally sanctioned Rs. 236 lakh, work worth Rs. 93.08 lakh were completed or were in progress.

Against the balance Rs. 142.92 lakh, an additional Rs. 82.08 lakh has been granted and the revised estimates for the balance work is now Rs. 225 lakh. The newly sanctioned amount was to be met from the general fund of the local body, Municipality sources said.

The public now hope that the drainage work would be completed as soon as possible without further time overrun and the roads would sport a new look. There are those who express concern at taking up road works just ahead of monsoon and also spending quite an amount on that score.The Karur townsmen were faced with a dilemma of different kind — they had to negotiate bad roads for close to three years.

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