For over three decades the residents of Poompuhar Nagar, off Kattabomman Street, have been filing one petition after another to authorities in the Coimbatore Corporation and also district administration.
Their grievance: absence of basic amenities.
R. Samuvel, a resident, says that the locality that has nearly 100 houses, does not have pucca roads, street lights, drinking water facility, under ground drainage, storm water drain facility and also garbage disposal facility.
He says that the roads are difficult to use and have turned slushy after any good downpour. At a street corner, is a pit the Corporation has not cared to close for long. In the absence of street lights, many a motorcycle rider has had a good fall. Along the residents houses runs the drain. R. Marimuthu says that the civic body has neither cared to cover the drain nor clean it. “It has been ages since the conservancy workers desilted and cleaned the drain.”
It is near the drain, on the Kattabomman Street, that the residents fetch water. The residents say during rain, the sewage from the drain flows onto the platform that hosts the water pipes, making life miserable for those who go there to fetch water.
The next of the residents’ grouse is the failure on the part of the Corporation to clean the Maniakarampalayam drain, which runs along the northern side of the Kattabomman Street.
The Corporation said that it would build retaining wall on both sides of the drain and also desilt the same to ensure free flow of sewage. It has not done so, the residents and say that at night they are forced to battle an army of mosquitoes. Whenever the residents raised the issue with the Corporation, the officials’ ready reply was that the residents did not have patta and so the civic body could not do much, says V. Ponnusamy, another resident.
Ward Councillor P.V. Subramaniam says that he has raised the issue at the Council and also taken it up with the officials.
Sources say that once the district administration gives them patta (title deed), the civic body will be able to provide all basic amenities.
