Madras High Court Chief Justice Munishwar Nath Bhandari on Thursday wondered why the Greater Chennai Corporation, Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB), Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution and Corporation (Tangedco) and similar other bodies do not work in tandem while cutting roads for laying underground cables or pipelines.
Presiding over the first Division Bench along with Justice D. Bharatha Chakravarthy, the Chief Justice said, it had become a routine to see well laid roads and pavements being dug and re-laid repeatedly for one work or the other. He said, there must be a mechanism in place and machines must be deployed to lay underground cables without causing much damage to the roads.
The Chief Justice lamented that it had become a common practice for Greater Chennai Corporation to repeatedly keep relaying roads because one agency after another keeps digging them for carrying one work after another. He expressed his anguish during the hearing of a contempt of court petition against a former Corporation Commissioner for poor maintenance of roads in the city.
When the litigant’s counsel submitted certain photographs, the corporation counsel said that Tangedco had dug roads at various places and that the corporation was relaying those roads. Immediately, the judges directed Tangedco to depute a responsible official to the court on March 10 to explain why roads were being dug for laying power cables despite availability of latest technological methods.
