Rajahmundry: Civic administration goes for a toss in the city as neither the municipal authorities nor the district administration takes any interest to ensure proper maintenance of sanitation, restore damaged roads and drains, solve mosquito, stray dog and pig menace and ensure proper streetlighting to avoid hardships to the people.
Under the influence of three spells of successive cyclonic storms that occurred recently, basic infrastructure like roads and drains suffered severe damage and the motorists have to take a bumpy ride on the roads.
Though local MLA Routhu Suryaprakasa Rao maintains that Rs 80 crore was sanctioned by the government to take up restoration works, so far nothing has been done. The authorities are taking up repair works to the damaged roads on a temporary basis by dumping quarry dust in the potholes and it all gets washed away whenever there is rainfall. There seems to be no relief from the ordeal to the motorists due to the apathy of the civic authorities.
Several roads including main road, RTC complex road and railway station road are encroached by all kinds of vendors and vehicle mechanics to carry out their business. This narrows down the passage and causes bottlenecks to the vehicular traffic. Dumping construction material and indiscriminate cutting of roads to lay pipelines are a common phenomenon and no action is being taken.
Poor maintenance of sanitation is another major problem in the city. One can find huge mounds of garbage piled up in street corners while some even dump on the roads. Petty vendors dump coconut shells, plastic carry bags and other garbage in the drains resulting in clogged drains.
Stagnant drains and drain water in low-lying residential areas become a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Lack of proper supervision on sanitation workers is resulting in only a few of them attending to work while others simply make entry in the muster rolls and attend to their personal works.
Equip-ment like fogging mach-ines to handle mosquito menace has become obsolete and the menace is left unattended. In the event of people falling sick they find no solace as dispensaries and urban health centres are being run without medical officers and health personnel and in some of them, no medicines are available.
Darkness prevails in several localities as streetlights fail to glow. According to an estimate, over 10,000 streetlights exist and out of them more than 50% of them are not functioning. Collector Neetu Kumari Prasad draws flak for confining herself only to Kakinada despite being responsible to monitor the entire district.
BJP urban city unit president Kshatriya Balasubramanyam Singh said, “There is no governance in the city as the officials concerned pay no interest to improve amenities.”
