The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Demolition a touchy issue

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Saturday, Dec 13, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Demolition a touchy issue

GHMC identifies 158 religious structures

HYDERABAD: After Friday’s Koti fiasco, you can forget about GHMC touching any religious structure encroaching on to the road or footpath space in the near future. It also clouds some of the successful shifts that were done through delicate persuasion.

Several old and new temples, mosques, graveyards and other religious structures along with flag posts and statues located either on the centre or on the sides of the main thoroughfares, have been identified as main bottlenecks for smooth traffic movement.

In fact, the municipal corporation had submitted a report to the A.P. High Court pointing out to this when a comprehensive action plan was sought for proper traffic management. About 200 encroachments including 158 religious structures were detailed with road stretches in the core area and officials expect 800 more in the suburbs.

Works suffer

And, the going has been pretty tough to widen roads for the last one decade even as growth of vehicular traffic took off. Competing communalisms and involvement of politicians ensured most are left untouched so much so, flyovers, road-over-bridges and other works had to take a back seat or suffer delays.

“We can’t just knock off such structures without repercussions. It calls for patient handling and continuous persuasion with stakeholders like religious leaders and local politicians. Localising the issue should be the credo,” explains a senior official.

Commercial interests near such structures and providing alternative means should be tackled if not remove altogether as, “most of them have a commercial interest,” points out another official. Recent successful efforts were in this direction as officials managed to convince stakeholders and built shops, slabs, sunk bore wells and even showed alternative sites.

Senior officials admit that time is not right for operations like the Koti incident with elections round the corner. “Every political party is looking for an issue. But, suspending staff disturbs their morale . Top officials should have owned up,” they reason.

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Andhra Pradesh