Hole this up!

Rains are just round the corner. It will give us all the much needed relief from the sweltering heat and hopefully, rains come falling down from the sky’s and fill up all our reservoirs and give a bountiful harvest.

But along with rains will come the bane of all vehicle drivers – potholes. Once rains come calling, Indian roads are turned into potholes, with very little of roads actually remaining. It all looks like a crater on the moon. Sadly, so many deaths are caused by these potholes, which the civic authorities fail to fill up; the question should ideally be why these potholes if so much money is spent year after year on roads. Adulteration, corruption and poor work, all together have been robbing so many lives on India roads and the Govt never ever comes up with any solution. Writing this on potholes has also become a yearly ritual; soon we will have an unfortunate death and we will have screaming debates on TV. Nothing changes, year after year.

Using the right material to build roads is useless as that never happens. What if we can have a system where we can detect a pothole before it forms? And this is what the University of Leeds, in Britain, hopes to automate. The University is working on an automatic system, which might be fitted to vehicles that ply regular routes, such as buses, to examine roads routinely for signs of damage. In one version of the future such a system would then activate a robotic repair vehicle when it came across a crack that needed fixing. This robot would come to the crack and fill it with a fast-setting bonding material (asphalt would not be needed, since no hole would yet have formed).

This might be too futuristic for India but if there is an automated system available, if we can prevent instead of attempting to cure, why not?