Times of India: Hyderabad: Sunday, September 14, 2014.
A recent RTI
query with the panchayat raj department, to ascertain the status of work on two
100 metre roads in the area, left locals bewildered when the reply they
received stated that the laying of roads was completed, when in fact, work had
not even started.
It is being
dubbed as the 'curious case of missing roads' by residents of Shaheen Nagar, a
neighbourhood which is along the Sri Sailam Highway.
The contract
for laying the CC roads at a cost of Rs 5 lakh was given to contractor P Vijay
Shankar Reddy in September 2012. A visit to the area showed that work had not
even begun. The roads were intended to be laid from house numbers 8-13 to
8-24/2 and from 7-88/3 to 8-27. However, there were no traces of either stone
chips or the 43 grade cement as detailed in the project estimate.
Astonishingly,
the reply from the PRI sub-division of Maheswaram stated that "there is no
delay in completion of work" and that there "are no changes in the
plan". The reply to the RTI query filed by an activist, Syed Qutubuddin,
listed executive engineer of the PRI subdivision in Hyderabad, the deputy
executive engineer and the assistant executive engineer of the PRI sub-divison
in Maheswaram as the officers responsible for the completion of work.
"It is
clear that the officials and the contractor are hand in glove, otherwise work
would have been completed ages ago. The area comes under Maheswaram assembly
constituency and Saroornagar mandal which has been a Congress stronghold. We
have been waiting for five years, ever since P Sabitha Indira Reddy represented
us, for civic infrastructure but nothing has happened so far," said
Mohammed Abdul Ghaffar, a resident of the area. There are at least three
similar instances of roads existing only on paper, he said.
Rahmat Ali,
another resident of the area, said that though Shaheen Nagar had connectivity
to the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, there were no streetlights and many
houses had still had no proper water connections. "The former MLA made
lots of promises but fulfilled none," he claimed.
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