On January 24, TOI published a story
highlighting how the war memorial had been vilified by a cluster of
stalls. Many residents had forgotten the structure since it was almost
lost in the thickness of the busy Gandhi market area. The issue was
first brought to light by a brigadier during the gold jubilee
celebrations of the territorial army on October 9, 2009. Later on, it was taken by the Ex-Servicemen’s Welfare Association, which wrote a letter to the district collector Jayashree Muralidharan requesting her to ensure that the memorial was respected and the encroachments removed.

Since it concerned the jurisdiction of the city corporation, the
collector wrote to the civic body, but even then things did not move in
the right direction. An official from the Trichy corporation even went
to the extent of saying that since the war memorial had been built prior
to 1994 when Trichy became a corporation, it did not concern it
directly. When the issue was brought to the notice of the incumbent corporation commissioner V P Dhandapani, he assured that he would do the needful.

The commissioner admitted that the place was not maintained during the
last decade and said, “the honour of the men who laid their lives for
the country is important than the rent collected from the five shops.”
Dhandapani further said on Wednesday that he would not do the mistake of
evicting the five persons abruptly but serve them three months notice.
“When you remove them abruptly, they go to the court and there is every
likelihood that they might get a ruling in their favour. As such, I am
going by the rule book and will remove them accordingly,” he said.