12/08/2026
Every Layer of Tar is a Layer of Flood: Dr. Audil Farooq Mir Demands Immediate Milling Protocol for Srinagar Roads
₹3,500 Crore Smart City, 60 Flood Hotspots, Govt Still Laying Conventional Macadam — Where is the Accountability?
Srinagar, August 14: Congress DCC President Srinagar Dr. Audil Farooq Mir (Lasjan) has mounted a forceful indictment of the manner in which road macadamisation is being undertaken across Srinagar, arguing that indiscriminate resurfacing without milling is progressively elevating road levels, compromising drainage gradients and aggravating the city’s chronic inundation crisis.
Dr. Audil said what is routinely presented as road development is, in many locations, becoming an exercise in incremental elevation without corresponding hydraulic planning. With each additional layer of macadam, the carriageway rises while adjoining homes, shops, entrances and drainage infrastructure remain at their previous levels.
“Every layer added without removing the old surface is not merely resurfacing a road; it is altering the relationship between the road, the house and the drainage system.”
He argued that the consequences are no longer theoretical. Raised road surfaces can progressively reduce the freeboard available to adjoining properties, bury or obstruct manholes and disturb the intended gradient through which stormwater is supposed to reach the drainage network.
Dr. Audil’s central demand is the systematic adoption of road milling before resurfacing. Milling involves the mechanical removal of the worn upper layer of an existing road while retaining the underlying structural pavement, after which a fresh wearing course can be applied without continually increasing the overall elevation of the carriageway.
“The objective should be to renew the road surface, not to keep raising the road itself.”
He said milling offers a technically rational and materially efficient alternative to the perpetual accumulation of asphalt layers. By removing the deteriorated surface before laying a new one, authorities can better preserve established road levels, protect drainage interfaces and reduce the progressive elevation that is increasingly becoming a problem in Srinagar’s built-up neighbourhoods.
Dr. Audil also criticised the continued use of crude scarification practices involving loaders, JCBs and similar machinery, saying such methods can damage existing road layers and further compromise structural integrity.
“Traditional scarification using crude methods with loaders, JCBs and similar machinery can damage road layers and further weaken their structural integrity. Such practices are simply too crude for 21st-century road management,” he said.
He stressed that road maintenance must also move away from fragmented, ad hoc seasonal interventions towards a properly structured contractual system. Seasonal repairs and periodic resurfacing, he said, should be planned and executed through contracts that prevent a single agency from cornering multiple works, thereby contributing to delays in scheduled maintenance.
“Existing commitments and actual bidding capacity must be strictly assessed before awarding new contracts. An agency already burdened with ongoing works cannot be expected to deliver additional assignments efficiently merely because it has secured another contract.”
Dr. Audil called for a J&K-wide monitoring mechanism to ensure that only adequately equipped and technically capable agencies are awarded works commensurate with their capacity, existing workload and available resources.
He also pointed to an additional advantage that, in his view, makes the continued absence of a milling-based approach even more difficult to justify: the material removed need not simply become waste.
“Milled road material can be processed and reused for comparatively lighter-use infrastructure, including pedestrian pathways, cycle tracks and neighbourhood roads, thereby extracting further value from an existing public asset,” he said.
Dr. Audil said that at a time when construction materials are becoming increasingly expensive and demand for basic urban infrastructure is rising, recycling recovered pavement material represents a practical component of a more resource-efficient urban works policy.
“We are raising roads while simultaneously spending more to build the very infrastructure that the milled material could help support. That is neither technically efficient nor financially prudent.”
Dr. Audil further criticised the failure of the Government to integrate successive macadamisation programmes with Srinagar’s stormwater and drainage architecture. He said road resurfacing cannot be treated as an isolated engineering activity in a city where road levels, drainage outlets, manholes, residential thresholds and natural water flows are intrinsically interconnected.
He also questioned the legacy of the Srinagar Smart City works, arguing that the scale of expenditure and prolonged disruption imposed on residents should have produced a city substantially more resilient to rainfall and urban inundation.
“A city cannot be called smart merely because its roads and public spaces look better. The real test of smart urban infrastructure is whether the city continues to function when it rains.”
According to Dr. Audil, Srinagar’s recurring waterlogging exposes a deeper institutional problem: infrastructure is being executed through individual projects rather than through a sufficiently integrated urban engineering framework.
He demanded an immediate technical review of ongoing and proposed macadamisation works, including road-level surveys, drainage-gradient assessments and a mandatory milling protocol before further resurfacing is undertaken in vulnerable areas.
He also called for greater public accountability over major urban infrastructure expenditure, insisting that citizens have a right to know whether road construction, drainage and flood-mitigation components were technically integrated at the planning stage and whether subsequent interventions have inadvertently compromised existing drainage capacity.
For Dr. Audil, the issue has therefore moved beyond routine civic criticism. It is a question of engineering discipline, public expenditure, contractual accountability and governmental responsibility.
“Srinagar does not need roads that are repeatedly made higher. It needs roads that are properly renewed, drains that remain functional and infrastructure planned as one interconnected system.”
