You need a back brace to prevent your rear from crumbling while driving on city roads. If not potholes, then you should be wary of fine granules of bitumen posing the threat of skidding. Not to mention the plumes of dust that shroud large sections of our main roads. Surely, these are the worst days for commuters.
Battered stretches
Begumpet, Punjagutta, Raj Bhavan Road, S.D. Road, Ameerpet, Dilsukhnagar, Tarnaka, Uppal, Amberpet, Hitec City, Kondapur, Chirec School to Gachibowli and Chandanagar. The list of roads at their ‘worst’ is endless. Interior roads are also battered beyond belief.
With the biodiversity meet scheduled in October, there is a perception among people that authorities are just waiting for another spell of showers before taking up repairs. “Will authorities repair roads for us or for foreign dignitaries?” asks an angry housewife, Ranjita Kundu, navigating the trench ridden Lalapet road.
“I come from Miyapur to Hitec City and it is damaged fully. They can’t just wait for the rains to be over,” complains Sagar, another IT chap. The RTC X road was never so bad in recent history.
“It is almost like a trench,” says Narender Reddy, a resident. “Such are the crevices that nothing will happen if you sleep on the road and a vehicle passes over,” says a distraught traffic policeman at Punjagutta.
If GHMC and R&B are oblivious to the travellers’ travails, metro rail authorities too are not far behind. The Tarnaka-Uppal stretch, where metro work is on, has been battered beyond recognition.
“One part is dug up, middle portion is barricaded and the leftover road is damaged. How do we travel?” asks Satyajit, a software employee travelling to Madhapur.
Hollow claims
Even more horrendous is the Miyapur –Kukatpally stretch where barricading for metro rail has been done. Loud proclamations of taking over road maintenance during construction by metro rail have turned out to be hollow. After initial repairs, they too seem to have left commuters to nature’s mercy. As streetlights were uprooted for the work, most stretches are dark and the replacements do not emit sufficient brightness.
