citizens’ group

potholes

2 siblings crushed by tanker in Thane as bike skids on pothole The kids were returning after celebrating Raksha Bandhan with an uncle.

Limca Book of Records

India Book of Records

Guinness World Records

A team took photographs of potholes and uploaded them on a central database over 38 days (PHOTO BY SATISH MALAVADE)

IT professional

BMC

100 blinking cars say no to potholes Thanekars join No Road No Vote protest car rally; TMC says it is doing everything possible.

Citizens’ group, aiming to shame authorities into taking action on risks that poor roads pose by getting the city into record books, surpri sed by fi nal count.The math comes to precisely 26,934. Ahas for over a month assiduously verified a list ofto get the city into record books and compel the authorities to take the threats posed by poor roads seriously.Spearheaded by Navin Lade, general secretary of the employment wing of the Republican Party of India, the project aimed at finding at least 20,000 potholes to get into record books. The final tally took even the team by surprise.Currently, Guinness World Records,andhave no entry for the most potholes in a city. Whilehas outright refused to entertain such a ‘feat’ — it said it wanted to steer clear of “political issues” and also pointed out there was no data from other cities to serve as a benchmark — the other two agreed to let the figure enter their annals, subject to verifi -cation.While a number of citizens sent photographs of potholes to Lade, he assembled a team to verify the claims. This team took photographs of potholes and uploaded them on a central database. An, Rajesh Soni, helped geo-tag all potholes to keep an accurate account. “So many individuals were reporting potholes they came across that there were bound to be some overlaps. By the end of the process, we saw 15 per cent duplication in the reported potholes,” said Soni. He said more potholes can be added to the website — mumbaipotholes.com — which will be updated dynamically.“It took our team 38 days to count and record all these potholes. We set out to find just 20,000 and ended up finding so many more. This exposes the sad reality of Mumbai’s crumbling infrastructure,” said Lade, who claimed to have spent Rs 4 lakh on the initiative.Mirror has extensively reported on the city’s pothole-riddled roads and test-driven the’s e-governance app to expose its failure in resolving civic complaints. One such report had prompted Lade to come up with the novel idea to rouse the civic body and other authorities.