Babus act faster when a complaint is followed up with an application under the Right To Information Act, find J P Nagar residents
Sore about the poor quality of roads in your neighbourhood, and the BBMP’s indifference to complaints?
There is a way to get it to act. Just file an RTI. This is what the residents of J P Nagar have discovered.
Upset over the poor condition of roads in their locality, members of the J P Nagar I Phase Residents Welfare Association complained to the BBMP in March. “We wrote to the Executive Engineer of South Zone complaining about the poor quality of bitumen used for laying roads in our area, using unskilled labourers for the work. Further, we requested the quality control section to visit and test the quality of the work,” said Ramakrishna Udupa, secretary of the association.
The reply from the quality control engineer at Jayanagar was shocking. “He said they do not have core cutting machines to test the quality of the work, and referred our complaint again to the executive engineer of south zone for follow-up. How can a quality control engineer work without equipment and enjoy the perks of the job? Refusing to accept their response, we complained to the then Commissioner, BBMP. But he too sang the same tune,” said Sheshadri Iyer, a retired horticulturist and member of the association.
Even after a few months, the association had received no response from the civic authorities. So in August, they decided to file an RTI application to find out the action taken by the commissioner on their complaint and the status of work. “As soon as we filed the application, BBMP officials started visiting our area. By September first week, engineers, road workers and contractors were busy re-laying all the roads,” said G Varadaraj, another member of the association.
He said when the workers laid the roads in February, they did not even run the road-rollers twice. “But when they were re-laying it this time, they ran the rollers more than 12 times over it and every time they spread bitumen, they were testing whether the quality and height were according to the standards,” Varadaraj said.
Udupa said, “Do they require repeated nagging and RTI applications from the people to do the work they are paid to do? The fact that the earlier road could not even withstand one rain and the way they re-laid the road proves that the work done earlier was sub-standard.”
Do they require repeated nagging and RTI applications from the people to do the work they are paid to do?
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