News Detail

• In order to increase the life of roads and make use of plastic waste generated in the city, Salem corporation has decided to relay roads with plastic waste in five places for over 3 kms.

• The five places in the city, identified by the corporation include Alamarathukadu, Kandampatty H Board, Mittapudur main road, Car street and 2nd Agraharam and Vidyanagar west cross no. 1. Meanwhile, 63 other roads have been identified in 22 divisions of the city to be restored and relaid under the Tamilnadu Urban Road Infrastructure Project (TURIP).

• All the renovation works including re-laying of 5 plastic waste mixed BT roads, will cost about Rs 13.295 crores. The corporation has already started the re-laying works from Thursday.

• "Under TURIP, the renovation cost for 63 roads in the city covering about 33.024kms will come approximately to Rs 12.7675 crores, while the costs for relaying 5 new plastic-waste mixed BT roads will come to around Rs 52.75 lakhs," said M Asokan, corporation commissioner.

• According to commissioner, the relaying work of the 63 roads will be completed in two packages. The first package will include re-laying of 36 roads at the cost of Rs 6.3875 crores, while the second package will include re-laying of 27 roads at the cost of Rs 6.38 crores in the second package.

• "The corporation will use funds available with them for laying the plastic-waste mixed roads," said A Asokan, corporation's executive engineer.

• "The plastics are being given by corporation's solid waste management centre at Cheetichavadi at free of cost," added the executive engineer.

• On Thursday, works for two plastic roads-Mittapudur main road in ward 5 and Aalamarathukadu road in ward 18 were inaugurated by the Salem mayor S Soundappan and commissioner Asokan. In addition, renovation works for four roads-Pudur Itteri road, ward 50; Old Bus Stand road, ward 32; Venkatesanpuram roads and cross roads, ward 14; and NKN nagar road, ward 3 under TURIP were also inaugurated the same day.

• "Work on Mittapudur and Alamarathukadu roads will be completed within next 15 days," said the executive engineer. "As of now, the corporation has taken up road re-laying work in places where the underground drainage work has been completed. In other divisions, work will start in the coming months," he added.

• For the people in Salem, this road relay work comes after a gap of eleven years. "When AIADMK was in power in 2001, Brindavan and Pitcharts roads covering 1.7kms were relaid using plastic waste," said the executive engineer. However, work was not undertaken during the next political parties reigns.

• An officer in the corporation said, "If these works are extended by every political party that comes to power, almost all the roads would have been relaid by now and the roads wouldn't have been damaged. Public money could have been saved and plastics waste reduced," he said.

Source