The Hindu        28.01.2011

Corporation stays blind to their demand for water

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.