Potholes could bring Mumbai into the much-coveted record books

A Mumbaikar is fed up with city potholes and civic authorities covering up for the mess. As a result, he has applied to both Limca Book of Record and Golden Book of Records for having the maximum number of potholes on city roads.

Navin Lade, a Mumbaikar and General Secretary of the employment wing of the Republican Party of Indian (RPI), came up with the idea of entering the number of potholes in Mumbai to the record books after noticing the pathetic situation of Mumbai roads.

While the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) claimed last week about less than 200 potholes remaining to be addressed, Lade claims there are about 27,365 potholes in Mumbai.

“It took our team around 38 days to count and record all these potholes. We set out to find just 20,000 and ended up finding so many more. Even now, I report different figures to people. This exposes the sad reality of Mumbai’s crumbling infrastructure,” said Lade, who claimed to have spent Rs 4 lakh on the initiative. The India Book of Records and Golden Book of Records has accepted the entry and are currently verifying the data. Although the Guinness Book of World Records has said that it is a political issue and that the organisation does not want to get into it. As of now, no book of records has an entry for the most potholes in a city.

Scores of citizens sent pictures of potholes in their areas to Lade. But he did not just add them in the tally, he sent a team to verify the same. The team took photographs of potholes and uploaded them on a central database. The technical team would then add these potholes and update them on their website — www.mumbaipotholes.com.

“Many people were reporting potholes as they came across. There were chances of duplication and overlaps. As expected there was around 15 per cent similar potholes reported at the end of the process. But we had them removed,” said Lade. A team of Information Technology (IT) helps geo-tag all potholes to keep an accurate account.