LUCKNOW: Bearing the brunt of dilapidated and pothole-ridden roads for the past one year, the people of Lucknow will have to continue to suffer for at least two more months.
Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) is once again facing a financial crunch and the civic body’s plans to generate funds for repair works has hit a roadblock.
Though officials assure that the matter will be sorted out soon, it will take at least a month to start the work and another 45-60 days to complete patchwork and renovation of damaged roads.
About 3,000km of road network in the city is under LMC’s jurisdiction. According to the civic body’s own records, repair of around 1,200km road network has been done in the past year and maintenance of the remaining was put in abeyance due to revenue losses during the pandemic.
After chief minister Yogi Adityanath recently directed all civic agencies in UP to repair streets in their jurisdiction within a month, LMC decided to take out money from corporators’ ward development fund and use the 15th Finance Commission grant for road repair work.
However, corporators opposed the move saying that the decision to take out money from ward development funds was taken without their consent. Now, mayor Sanyukta Bhatia has asked officers to take corporators into confidence and announced to give Rs 5 crore from the mayor’s contingency fund.
“We had earmarked Rs 80 crore in LMC’s annual budget for maintenance of roads, but due to the ongoing pandemic, our revenue remained low this year, hence the required renovation work could not be carried out,” said municipal commissioner Ajay Dwivedi.
“Subsequently, we decided to take out Rs 22 crore from the corporators’ ward development fund for patchwork of broken roads in inner residential colonies and utilise a Rs 50-crore grant from the 15th Finance Commission to renovate main city stretches,” he added.
There are 110 wards and each corporator representing them gets about Rs 1.2 crore per annum for local development work. If corporators give consent, LMC will take out Rs 20 lakh from the fund of each to carry out road repair in the ward they represent.
