Hyderabad: The quality of roads built for the upcoming Krishna Pushkaralu is abysmal, and a few roads have been totally ruined by the recent rains in the vast Mahbubnagar district.
The Panchayat Raj department was sanctioned Rs 64.27 crore to build 60 metal roads, with bitumen or cement toppings, from the existing highways to the newly-proposed ghats.
Officials began the work immediately after the money was sanctioned. It is said that 15 per cent of proposed roads have been constructed leading to the banks of the river Krishna.
The government has proposed to have 52 Pushkar ghats, 35 of them new. The government has sanctioned Rs 100 crore to build the bathing ghats and repairs to the panchayat raj guest houses apart from the roads.
So far, the Panchayat Raj officials have completed works of worth Rs 9.16 crore at several places. But the work has been of such poor quality that the metal roads were badly damaged.
The new roads at Godimalla near Alampur were badly damaged before they could be topped with bitumen or cement. Ironically, several existing roads were damaged by the heavy vehicles used to build the new roads. Several village roads in Alampur and Itikyala mandals were damaged due to this.
Panchayat Raj engineer-in-chief M. Satyanara-yana Reddy said that he along with special chief secretary S.P. Singh would visit all the ghats and check the quality in works.
“We will take action against erring contractors if their work is of low quality,” he said. The department’s superintending engineer M. Raghu said the recent rain had impacted the new roads. “We are rectifying the problem and taking measures to ensure that it does not happen again,” he said.
Traffic crawling at 20km/h
The state government has proposed to build 35 more pushkar ghats in Mahbubnagar district in addition to the 17 ghats on the banks of the Krishna.
Although the government was thinking of distributing the expected rush of pilgrims to the Krishna Pushkaralu to the new ghats, they are bedevilled by poor connectivity.
A few proposed ghats in Alampur, Maktal, Gadwal and Kolhapur mandal have poor quality roads leading up to them. The Godimalla ghat in Alampur mandal is 17 km from the Alampur temple. The road is so bad that it takes one hour to cover the distance.
The path — it cannot be called a road — faces bottlenecks in some villages on the way. Roads and Panchayat Raj officials are repairing damaged culverts, which has further affected the roads. Traffic crawls at about 20kmph in some villages in Itikyala and Alampur mandals.
Mr Krishna Reddy and Mr Kodanda Ramaiah from Godimalla asked who would come to these remote places for a holy dips. “Road connectivity is very poor. The village has two roads, one from the highway and another from Alampur. Another route is totally damaged. The Alampur road is only one for pilgrims. The single roads may not suit them,” they said.
