More than two months after residents of Adarshapally Road squatted on New Town’s Major Arterial Road (MAR) demanding their street to be repaired, the stretch has hardly seen any improvement as no government department wants to claim that road as their responsibility.
The 5km Adarshapally Road, which passes along Bagjola canal and connects New Town’s MAR near Biswa Bangla Convention Centre at Jatragachhi with Kestopur on VIP Road, serves as the only link to the outside world not only to the residents of some upscale complexes, but also to thousands of villagers living along the stretch.
On November 1 last year, about 200 residents of housings — such as Clubtown Courtyard, PS Ixora and Sunrise Greens — had converged on New Town’s MAR and staged a demonstration stalling traffic for more than half an hour demanding its immediate repair. The demonstration was lifted only after police and Housing and Infrastructure Development Corporation (Hidco) officials intervened and assured them of immediate repairs.
Since then patchwork has been done on barely a 1km stretch from the MAR, while the remaining stretch remained filled with craters of various sizes.
“In November, Hidco had promised to repair the road in 2018 itself. But they have merely carried out patchwork, that too, on a short stretch. The stretch in front of our housing estate remains dotted with potholes,” said Dibyajyoti Bagchi, 62, a resident of Clubtown Courtyard.
Hidco — which maintains New Town — has made it clear that the road is not under their jurisdiction and therefore they would not maintain it.
“The road is not our responsibility as the area is not under us. It is the job of the public works department. Still we have carried out some patchwork to fill the craters on a small stretch after local residents staged a demonstration demanding repairs in November. But it is not for us to do the rest,” said a senior Hidco official.
The public works department, in turn, passes the buck to the irrigation department.
“The road belongs to the irrigation department. They have recently expressed an interest to transfer it to us but that’s a long-drawn process and we are yet to get its ownership,” said a senior engineer of the public works department.
He failed to throw light on by when, if at all, the road would be transferred to them.
The area falls under Jyangra Hatiara 2 No. gram panchayat. The panchayat chief, Shibu Gayen, also said that the road was the irrigation department’s responsibility.
A senior official of the south division in the irrigation department admitted that the road belonged to them. He, however, said that he was not aware of any proposal to hand it over to the public works department. “As far as I know, Hidco is supposed to maintain it,” he told The Telegraph Salt Lake on Wednesday.
People’s plight
As officials in the various wings of the government continue to blame one another for the road’s poor upkeep, local residents who have to depend on it for everyday commute remain a dejected lot.
Ananyabrata Das, 31, a resident of PS Ixora housing complex, said: “I take a bone-jarring ride in an autorickshaw to reach New Town’s Jatragachhi crossing for my work everyday. But the road is in such bad shape that I fear the auto-rickshaws will turn turtle any moment. Even app cabs don’t want to come to our complex and often cancel ride bookings fearing damage to their vehicles,” he said.
Angshuman Saha, 42, a resident of Sunrise Greens who works with IBM at New Town, voiced the same concern. “Craters are not the only problem. There is no streetlight and the road is thoroughly encroached upon by traders of nearby villages. In some places, encroachers have eaten up more than half the road width. It’s no surprise that accidents take place here every now and then as vehicles run into one another or go dangerously close to the roadside canal while negotiating the craters. But if maintained properly, the road can double as a vital link to the fledgling township just as the one that connects New Town’s Chinar Park with Baguiati-Joramondir on VIP Road,” he said.
Police pacify residents during the road blockade on November 1. Mayukh Sengupta