The civic authority, blamed for the pathetic state of Mumbai’s thoroughfares, has decided to use technology to keep an eye on road contractors. For the first time, it will employ a combination of systems — from global positioning devices, temperature sensors to computers that gather industrial data — to monitor road-building work in real time.
The systems will transmit information about every move made by contractors and their workers to the BMC’s headquarters, saving officials the trouble of conducting frequent site inspections. Effectively, this will prevent road construction firms from cutting corners and doing a shoddy job.
A senior BMC official said that the onus of buying some of the systems will be on contractors. “In every contract henceforth, there will be a clause which will require them to install computers and sensors on their equipment and vehicles (mainly batch-mixing machines, road rollers). We will set up a monitoring room, where all the data transmitted by the systems can be viewed online,” he said.
The systems the civic body has identified for keeping a check are: heat sensors, density sensors, GPS devices and a network of computers that will gather and analyse real-time construction data.
Heat sensors will be fixed on batch-mixing machines and road rollers, and they will record the temperatures at which asphalt and tar are combined and laid on the road. Heat is an important factor in the road-building process. If the materials are not heated or laid out at a certain temperature, the quality of the road suffers.
Apart from heat sensors, density sensors and data-gathering computers, known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, will also be installed on batch-mixing machines. GPS devices will be fixed on trucks that carry the mixture of asphalt and tar to the site.
“All the devices will constantly send data to the BMC headquarters. Officials will be able to view the information on a dedicated website,” said Shantanu Kulkarni, the director of Probity Software, one of the firms helping the civic body use technology to monitor contractors’ work.
GPS devices, he said, would record the time and location of the trucks transporting the said mixture. They will also provide the time when the materials are unloaded at a site. “Officials will know how many trips road rollers make,” Kulkarni said.
At the BMC headquarters, a software for quality parameters and control will be installed. If a contractor bypasses any quality process, officials will come to know about it immediately.
The civic authority is likely to start using the technology for road resurfacing projects across the city. According to a BMC official, road retrenching contracts worth Rs 120 crore will be announced soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment