Residents under the aegis of the Thadambattuthazham-Parambil Bazaar Road Action Committee staged a sit-in at Thadambattuthazham Junction here on Tuesday evening demanding that the State government allot funds for widening the road.
Corporation councillors K.C. Shobita (Congress) and O. Sadasivan (Communist Party of India-Marxist) took part in the protest.
A. Pradeepkumar, MLA, who inaugurated the protest, accused the State government of announcing multi-crore schemes on a daily basis without having any concrete proposals for implementing them. However, the government had failed to resolve simple traffic problems by widening small roads or improving junctions in towns and cities. The government had not kept its promises even on projects drawn up several years ago.
Mr. Pradeepkumar said that the State budget had not earmarked any funds for the much-awaited Mananchira-Vellimadukunnu road-widening project. It dropped the monorail project and came up with the Light Metro project. Elected representatives were not consulted on the detailed project report and government officials had no idea if the Public-Private-Participation model for Light Metro was economically feasibly, he said.
He said that the traffic congestion at Thadambattuthazham Junction could be solved by widening just 200 metres of the 4-km road leading to Parambil Bazaar. Previously the District Collector and the Public Works Department had conceived a project to acquire land. But it had remained in cold storage so far, Mr. Pradeepkumar said.
Mr. Sadasivan said that all the property owners had positively responded to the project for widening the road. The shopkeepers at the junction needed to be rehabilitated. A few families had expressed some reservations. But they totally agreed with the widening of the road from Thadambattuthazham Junction to the underpass of the Kozhikode Bypass.
However, many shopkeepers want to demolish the wall of a park owned by the Kozhikode Corporation to make it easier for buses to pass through the tri-junction. They demand that the existing autorickshaw stand be shifted from the junction.
