The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) on Tuesday launched what it termed as ‘rapid road technology’ utilising precast concrete slabs to a white-top a 500-metre stretch at Binnamangala junction, where 100 Feet Road and Old Madras Road meet.
Under the pilot project, the civic body is embedding prefabricated concrete slabs (20 feet in length and 5 feet in width) on the road . The concretised slabs will be connected by steel cables on either side of the joints using cranes.
In the current scheme of things, the BBMP takes around 26 to 28 days to white-top a road. This includes milling, levelling, providing bituminous concrete in the addition to the 21 days of curing period. Under the new experimental technology it is deploying, the concrete slabs are brought to the site and placed on the road using cranes.
According to BBMP officials, the new method helps in white-topping half a kilometre of road in a day. The entire project can be completed in five days including one or two days for preparatory work like milling and levelling, before placing the concrete slabs.
While the conventional white topping of 1 km of road typically costs Rs 7.5 crore, under the new method, it is higher at Rs 9.3 crore. The higher cost is is because of transportation of the precast from the plant to the construction site.
UltraTech Cement is the innovation partner in the project.
“Vehicular traffic is impacted during white-topping, resulting in massive traffic jams. To avoid this, the BBMP is implementing an innovative technology called rapid road work in practice. This eliminates the need for road curing. If this is successful, we will take the technology to other parts of the city,” BBMP chief commissioner Tushar Giri Nath said on Wednesday (Nov 23) after inspecting the stretch.
Giri Nath also said that the agency was considering ideas to reduce the cost by setting up makeshift precast labs in places where the where the project will be taken up.
The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is proposing to white-top 39 additional roads in the Bengaluru city covering a total length of 114.46 km in the city.
The project with an estimated cost of Rs. 1449 crores will be the third and the largest phase of white-topping to be taken up by the city.
Some of the key roads that are planned to be white-topped include the Outer Ring Road (ORR) from Silk Board to KR Puram, Kammanahalli Main Road, Ulsoor Lake Road, Indiranagar Double Road, and Inner Ring Road at Yeshwanthpur, among others.
Under the first two phases of the project, around 143 km of roads in the city have been white-topped(or almost nearing completion).