GHMC plans CRMP 2.0, but with steep price tag

GHMC's CRMP extension proposal for road maintenance includes cost escalation, private agency involvement, and public grievance handling.

The Comprehensive Road Maintenance Programme (CRMP), a successful model of road maintenance adopted by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) five years ago, is proposed for extension by another five years, albeit with high cost escalation.

This is part of the agenda of items to be placed before the GHMC’s standing committee for its Thursday’s meeting. Two options are being placed for the extension, one for bringing 744.22 kilometres of road length under CRMP with a cost estimate of ₹2,491 crore for the next five years, and the second, for enhancing the road length to 1142.54 kilometres with a cost estimate of ₹3,825 crore for the same period.

CRMP was promoted towards the end of 2019 by the then Minister for Municipal Administration & Urban Development K. T. Rama Rao, for giving a quantum leap to the quality of roads which had been in pathetic conditions under GHMC’s own maintenance. As part of the programme, over 811 kilometres of road length from major thoroughfares were given out for private maintenance, at a cost of ₹1,827 crore for a five-year period, starting from 2020. This is ₹750-800 crore more than what GHMC would spend on road maintenance over the same period of time.

As part of the package, the private agencies were to not only repair roads as and when the need arose, but also recarpet all the roads at least once during the five-year period, after due milling process. Five private agencies were maintaining the roads in six zones of GHMC, under the CRMP.

“The agreement with the agencies had provisions for recarpeting of 50% of the roads in the first year alone, 30% in the second, and the remaining 20% in the following year. The programme was hugely successful, and the roads laid in the first year could still go on for two more years,” shared an engineer under the condition of anonymity.

Though initially it was proposed that the agencies were to be given the responsibilities of de-silting of the stormwater drains, monsoon emergency monitoring and removal of debris and litter from footpath, the pre-bid meeting saw the contractors opposing these additional duties. An agreement was reached finally, for carriageway and footpath maintenance, recarpeting, mechanical sweeping of roads, maintenance of medians and greenery, lane marking, signages, kerb painting and lifting of the manhole covers to road height, among others.

The agency will have to handle public grievances pertaining to road conditions, and also grant road cutting permissions for other infrastructural utilities.