Chennai: Thousands of Chennaiites descend on the Besant Nagar beach to escape the sultry heat, particularly during the weekend holidays, but this Sunday they were greeted with total darkness as the streetlights failed in the entire posh locality. It appeared that the Chennai Corporation babus have been sleeping these past few weeks as several large stretches of the metropolis have suffered dark roads for long durations and locals say complaints have only fallen on deaf ears.
“With increasing incidence of law and order problems and chain-snatching cases, it is sheer criminal negligence on the part of the Corporation to let almost the entire Besant Nagar stretch to remain dark through Sunday evening and night.
Apart from the fear of chain snatching threat, we are terrified at the thought of stepping out in these dark roads with drunken riders zipping past on their weekend revelry”, said Prof V. Chandrasekhar, president, Senior Citizen Group, Besant Nagar.
He said the problem of dark streets has been haunting Besant Nagar rather too frequently for comfort. “We have complained many times to the Corporation. You cannot find any senior citizen stepping out here after six in the evening”.
“The Blue Cross road here was in total darkness when I visited on Saturday”, said Ms Kamakshi Subramaniam, co-founder, Spark, a Besant Nagar civic group.
“Most streetlights do not burn, most of the time, in Vannanthurai area adjoining Besant Nagar”, she said, adding that in many places, new lampposts have been erected but they have not been fitted with LED lights.
“Streetlights are essential for the residents’ safety. Unless the Corporation officials attend to complaints and undertake periodical inspection visits, we will not find any light in this dark situation”, said Kamakshi.
When contacted, a senior official at the Adyar Zonal office of the Corporation maintained that his men attended to complaints “as and when we receive them”. Problems relating to lampposts were rectified quickly but if the issue related to cable fault, it normally took a day or two to rectify. It was true that there were complaints of streetlights not burning on the Second Avenue Road, Third Main Road and the 25th Cross Street in Besant Nagar, but that was due to cable fault and the Corporation workers were attending to the problem, he said. Strangely, he did not want to be named.
Activist R. Gopalakrishnan of KK Nagar said people usually suffered the problems instead of lodging complaints. “Perhaps this is because many people are not aware there is a toll-free complaint number, 1913. Corporation must display this phone number on all the lamp posts”, he told DC.
