Poor sanitary conditions around Puthur Market, housing one of the major vegetable and fish markets in the city, is turning out to be a stinking trouble for consumers visiting the market for their daily needs. Residents living around the market complain that indiscriminate dumping of garbage around the market, especially the fish market, is posing a health hazard. Boxes and containers used for packing fish are dumped. Although the corporation stations a garbage vehicle for traders to dump wastes, a majority of the traders dump the wastes all around. Similarly, vegetable wastes and garbage could be found strewn around the bins placed in front of the market.
An over-pervading stench prevails around the market owing to the poor sanitary conditions, alleges a group of residents, who staged a protest recently seeking the shifting of the market. The entire Puthur Market, locals say, is cramped and the decrepit building needs to be renovated.
“People living around the market and consumers visiting it endure the stink and poor sanitary conditions. It is time the civic body expedited its plans of modernising the fish markets in the city in the interest of the public,” says a local resident, who did not want to be named.
Although Tiruchirapalli City Corporation has planned to construct a modern wholesale fish market in the city and build new retail shops for traders at the fish market at Puthur, the project is yet to take off. An official resolution on the subject adopted at the Corporation Council in June 2012 said the fish market is currently functioning in the congested locality of Renganathapuram area. In the absence of adequate space for parking heavy and light vehicles loading and unloading fish at the market, they were being parked on a road abutting the southern side of the market, causing congestion. With the locality being a residential area surrounded by hospitals, residents were facing hardships.
The civic body had then planned to shift the wholesale section of the fish market to the new facility to be built on a piece of land owned by the corporation along the Kuzhumikarai Road. The new market would have shops for wholesale traders, fish processing area, and an effluent treatment plant. New shops would be built for retail traders at Puthur fish market and also at Gandhi Market in the city, replacing the existing ones, the resolution said.
More recently, the Corporation Council gave its nod for roping in Kerala State Coastal Area Development Corporation to design a modern fish complex at Kasivilangi in the city. A State-owned company, Kerala corporation is technically equipped to design and prepare the project report, official sources said. The civic body plans to establish the fish market at Kasivilangi on a 2.5-acre site along the Kuzhumani Road. However, none of the plans of the civic body had taken off so far and much would depend on its ability to find agencies to fund the projects.
