The Hindu 28.01.2011
Corporation stays blind to their demand for water
Roadside pit only source of water for Speaker’s neighbours
Big rISK: A visually challenged person collecting drinking water from a pit. —Photo: A. Shaikmohideen
The Tirunelveli Corporation’s two-year-old assurance on installing a
drinking water tap for the benefit of eight families having a good
number of visually and physically challenged persons near Maharaja Nagar
‘Uzhavar Santhai’ has vanished into thin air as these people are still
collecting their drinking water from a roadside pit everyday after
crossing the road amid speeding vehicles.
For all these families, living in small tiled houses
near the Blind School on the Maharaja Nagar Farmers’ Market Road for
more than 27 years, the pit in a highly unhygienic condition is the
source of drinking water. Water leaking from the valve of a main
pipeline carrying drinking water to a posh area accumulates in the pit
every morning.
Apart from quenching the thirst of these eight poor families, the pit also quenches the thirst of stray dogs and cattle.
Though Speaker R. Avudaiyappan has been crossing this
pit for the past five years to reach his home, just 500 metres away from
this colony, no step has been taken to provide a water tap for these
differently-abled persons.
There is every possibility of the visually challenged
persons being hit by speeding vehicles. After their repeated appeals to
the Corporation officials praying for a water tap near their house
failed to make any positive impact, petitions were forwarded to the
district administration and to the minister concerned, but those efforts
too went in vain.
The corporation, which received the petition in 2008,
gave a reply: “We’ll not cut the road to lay the drinking water pipeline
from the main pipe for installing a tap near your house”. The
Corporation, which has turned a blind eye to the issue of laying
speed-breakers near the houses of politically influential persons of
Tirunelveli and Palayamkottai, also refused to take steps for erecting
speed-breakers near the houses of these visually challenged, also
seeking free house-site pattas.
After this issue was highlighted in The Hindu in
December 2008, the Corporation Council passed a resolution in favour of
installation of water taps. However, no step has been taken during the
past two years to fulfill their demand.
