The Hindu : Brazen encroachments shock Tirupati civic chief

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 17, 2002

Southern States

Southern States - Andhra Pradesh

Brazen encroachments shock Tirupati civic chief

By Our Special Correspondent

TIRUPATI Dec. 16. Encroachment of roads and pavements by unauthorised shops has become so rampant in Tirupati town that in some places bootleggers and habitual land grabbers were collecting rents from gullible shopkeepers either by rolling up their sleeves or flexing their muscles. Interestingly, neither the land nor the shop belonged to them but to the municipality

Top-brass of the Tirupati municipal council led by its Chairperson, K. Sankar Reddy, on Monday went around different localities of the town to check encroachment of municipal lands and pavements by local traders and businessmen. The team was in for a pleasant surprise while going around the congested shopping area of T.K. Street, inspecting encroachment of its pavement. When Mr. Reddy enquired with the shopkeepers whether they knew that the land/pavement they were occupying belonged to the municipality, they said yes. What further surprised the officials was that the shopkeepers rather naively were paying rent for the encroached sites to a person who visited them every month claiming it was his property.

During the course of their inspection from Ramakrishna theatre to the Crime station, the team comprising the Municipal Commissioner, Town Planning officer, revenue officer, was shocked to see that shopkeepers in the prime business locality had brazenly encroached 15 feet into the municipal pavement/road causing shrinkage of the road width.

The encroachers did not dispute the municipality's claim over the encroached roads but agreed that they had over-stepped into them. Mr. Reddy and his entourage also witnessed a similar sight along the bypass road. The team also took serious note of haphazard parking and blatant breach of traffic rules en route and wondered as to how with such impediments would the municipality/TUDA be able to develop the town on the lines of Singapore as envisioned by the Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu. The Chairman ordered officials to remove all the encroachments and officially build shopping lines on the pavements so that it served both the municipality and the traders. He said preference would be given to poor and downtrodden petty traders in the re-allotment of the proposed shops. The Centre-sponsored Eco-City programme sanctioned to Tirupati would be launched from January 5, and the team was setting in motion all the preliminaries in this behalf also.

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