Rabindranath Biswas
Diglipur, Nov. 05: It is not only the NH4, which is in dilapidated condition, the rural roads in many villages under Diglipur Tehsil are in unspeakable bad shape, and among these rural roads, the 30 km (approx.) Shayamnagar road (from Diglipur Bazaar) is in a severely neglected state.
As per report, the lone road to Shayamnagar which passes through the villages like Madhupur, Laxmipur, Milangram, Swarajgram, Radhanagar and then Shyamnagar is in a despicable condition. In fact, barring a few portions, the entire stretch of road in Milangram village area has significantly deteriorated, posing threat to the lives of the commuters. Motorists often find themselves in critical situations to navigate their way through some portions of this road which have become pool waters. “The road is no longer motorable; in fact, a sizable part of the road has lost its surfaces while other parts have turned hazardous owing to the mammoth sized potholes and damages”, lamented the vehicle owners regularly using the road. “Our clothes are splattered with muddy water from the moving vehicles through these potholes forcing us to cancel our trips to Bazaar for our works”, rues the residents.
The residents of the locality further said that they have been making plea after plea to the local leaders and the higher authorities of the Administration for the last couple of years for the urgent recarpeting of the road. However, the road was not repaired even before the onset of the rainy season this year as well, the residents alleged. Some residents expressed severe disappointment with the persistently poor condition of the road, which has remained unaddressed for a couple of years now. The Pradhan of the area said that despite the urgent need for road recarpeting, no required actions have been taken. Furthermore, no repair work was carried out by the responsible department prior to the rainy season, ignoring the safety of commuters, the Pradhan said.
“The road in the area has not been macadmised nor any maintenance of the road has been done”, a senior citizen of the locality rued. “The Administration seems to have forgotten us”, he further alleged. “The concerned Department should construct or repair the utter dilapidated road on a priority basis as lives are very precious”, the residents urged.
Amid this, when contacted on phone to know the status of the work of the road in question, the Executive Engineer, APWD, Diglipur told Andaman Sheekha Daily that the Dept.’s projects works are being reportedly thwarted by a plethora of constraints. APWD is yet to get a quarry allotted in its name and the Dept. is struggling due to the crunch of aggregates required to carry out road works, the EE said. The stone quarries allotted to private parties were submerged by rain water and they couldn’t extract the stones, which resulted in the delay in executing the road works, the APWD local authority alleged. Attributing the blame on climate, the EE also said that there has been excessive rain in the last couple of months and which provided them no opportunity to carry out road works, as the road works need fair weather, the APWD Official said. However, he is hopeful that the department will soon be allotted with a stone quarry as the Deputy Commissioner, N & M Andaman assured the EE when he had apprised the DC of the aggregate issue. In the meantime, road works will be reportedly started with the available aggregates as soon as the weather turns fair and friendly to road works, the EE further said.
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