PANAJI
Residents and visitors to the capital city will have to soon get used to dusty environs and chaotic traffic of the kind witnessed in the nearly 10 months between October last year and June this year as yet another phase of road blockages and material being dumped for executing ‘Smart City’ projects is in the offing.
Now, one of the most busy and frequently used central Panaji thoroughfare “ 18th June Road “ is being taken up for the ‘Smart City’ related project of laying a sewerage line in the next couple of days or so.
Work of laying the sewerage pipeline will be taken up under Smart City project on this busy road but managing director and CEO of Imagine Panaji Smart City Development Limited (IPSCDL) Sanjit Rodrigues, IAS, claimed that the work will be carried out section by section.
“The methodology used will be trenchless Horizontal Direct Drilling (HDD) which does not require trenches to be dug for laying the pipeline,” Rodrigues said, while speaking to the media on the sidelines of an interaction with Ribandar residents to explain ‘Smart City’ works there.
The government and the IPSCDL contractors besides multiple government departments had come under fire from angry residents and Opposition political parties when multiple roads of the capital were dug up for several months to execute the sewerage pipeline and smart road projects. Traffic was in chaos and businesses suffered drastic fall in turnovers during nearly nine to ten months during which the work was being executed.
The issue was intensely debated in the Goa legislative assembly where even Revenue Minister Atanasio Monserrate, who represents Panaji and is a member of the IPSCDL BoD along with his mayor-son Rohit, was critical of the unplanned manner in which the contractors were executing the work.
The State government then hurriedly decided to halt the work and cover the excavated roads with a fresh coat of hotmix tarmac in June but soon these freshly laid roads began sinking and were pot-hole ridden across the city.
Meanwhile, a five kilometre long stretch at Ribandar will also witness similar sewerage pipeline laying work from Vithal Mandir to Ribandar-Patto.
At an interaction organised at the Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) for the residents of Ribandar who raised a hue and cry over the nod given by the collector for digging the road, Rodrigues said, it will take approximately five months to complete.
Rodrigues said, the work is to connect the main underground sewerage pipeline to the sewerage treatment plant (STP) is being taken up in five phases of approximately one-kilometre each to minimise the hardship to residents.
Each of the phases will take 30 days to complete he said, but some of the Ribandar residents argued that they will take to the streets and block the contractors if work on the next phase is started without completing the previous one.
