Rain pain gives way to pothole agony for city motorists and pedestrians

At the entrance of West Marredpally, half the street is filled with water and a quarter of it has a long crack in the middle of the road that stretches to nearly 30 feet. It is not a pothole. “Walking here is dangerous as you can see. The vehicles move in a narrow space and splash water on all the pedestrians,” says a student from a coaching centre who navigates the area daily. “This has been like this for one month,” he says.

The situation is no different elsewhere in many localities, be it Ameerpet, Banjara Hills, S.R. Nagar or near KBR Park or Gudimalkapur. The flowing rivers on the roads after heavy rain over the past few days have left behind banks of sand, rubble and debris in almost all parts of the city. The rutted, gutted and pockmarked roads are giving nightmares to motorists as well as pedestrians.

The Banjara Hills Road no 9 branches off from Rd no 10. And immediately the motorists notice that they are in a dangerous territory. Even drivers of SUVs try to swerve and dodge the wrecked road as the vehicle wobbles from side to side.

On the road that encircles the KBR Park, civic officials have dug up the road with an earthmover to create a channel to drain the rain water. The same thing has been done in Maitrivanam area. The result: traffic moves slowly and whatever little pedestrian space is there has disappeared.

The gravity of the situation can be gauged from data that the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation identified 14,050 potholes on September 4 and it repaired 11,442. The long spell of rain has changed the metric with potholes cropping up in newer locations due to water logging.

Social media is flooded with images and responses from GHMC about potholes. “Please address the potholes near Good Time Liquor Store, at the end of High Tension Road, Madhava Hills, Kondapur, Serilingampally. It’s causing serious inconvenience and is a safety hazard. Kindly take urgent action,” posted one user and followed it up with another post: “They are busy in closing the tickets instead of filling the potholes.”

Ironically, a sociologist has published a study on Hyderabad’s pothole agony. ‘Roads, Potholes and the Embodied Politics of Driving in Urban India’, by Sneha Annavarapu uses real life examples from the city to understand how potholes are linked to different narratives. “Potholes engender political subjectivities in three ways: one, they generate, sustain and institutionalise narratives of state corruption; two, through their capacity to hurt, injure and even kill certain motoring bodies, potholes enable an experience of inequality in the register of pain and risk; and three, potholes spawn citizen engagement and claims-making,” says the paper that draws on a variety of sources.

Some of the long-time potholes in the city can now be seen in Google Street View images as well.