'50 MLAs hit roads to inspect them, trip on 1,900 spot'

Fifty Delhi MLAs on Saturday hit roads for a first-hand realty check of their condition and tripped on nearly 1900 trouble spots in form of potholes and uneven carpeting and deluged the PWD with their complaints.

The PWD got a total of 1,897 900 complaints of faulty Delhi roads, plagued by uneven surface and gaping potholes as 50 MLAs along with as many engineers undertook the city-wide inspection of its 1260 km of roads maintained by PWD.

The Public Works Department got the complainants on city roads through its app.

A total of 50 teams of one MLA and one engineer each were given the responsibility to inspect 25 kilometers of roads each and report about their condition.

Earlier this week, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had announced to launch a city-wide exercise to examine roads from October 5 to identify potholed ones.

According to a statement, a total of 1,897 reports were submitted to the PWD through the app by legislators.

"Surprisingly, the maximum number of reports -- 1,181 -- were related to roads being uneven, and not of potholes.

"The total number of potholes was 583 and 133 reports were filed about cases where the deficiencies in the roads were due to other departments," it stated.

Both sides of the road were inspected by teams on Saturday, based on which the PWD will now begin to repair all its roads on a "war footing", the government said.

In the morning, Kejriwal in a series of tweets said it was for the first time that such a big-scale road inspection was being done to free PWD roads from potholes caused by rains and wear and tear.

During the day-long inspection, photos of potholes or badly maintained roads were taken and shared with the department through a mobile application.

"As soon as this data is compiled, the work of repairing the roads will start," the statement stated.

If the work of another department is going on, PWD has been directed to wait for the work to complete before carrying out the repair work, it stated.

The rest of the roads will be repaired immediately, it added.