The road-widening woks at the historic Sri Raja Rajeshwara Swamy Devasthanam in Vemulawada of Karimnagar district, remained on paper for over a decade-and-a-half.
The pilgrims rush to the historic shrine is growing steadily over the years. But, the proposal to take up road-widening works remained a non-starter due to various reasons.
Almost all the district Collectors visited the shrine and promised to take up the road-widening works for the benefit of the pilgrims and beautify the shrine as tourist spot, but in vain.
The last temple board committee also proposed to take up road-widening works at a cost of Rs.14.9 crore and submitted the report to the government in 2013. During the period, the Vemulawada residents also launched agitational programmes demanding the government to take up road-widening works.
Even as the present Telangana State government had been planning to take up massive developmental programmes at the shrine, Karimnagar MP B. Vinod Kumar’s suggestion that the heritage structures along the existing roads should not be damaged or removed instead authorities should lay a new bypass road was opposed by the locals.
Now, the locals were against the stoppage of road-widening works.
RTI activist Nagaraju said that there were no heritage structures along the road from the bridge to the temple. The businessmen and traders had occupied them and causing serious inconvenience to the pilgrims coming from far-flung places, he said and demanded that the road-widening works should be taken up at any cost.
He also said that they would launch a signature campaign for the road-widening works and submit a memorandum to Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
Favouring the road-widening works, the temple authorities said that the pilgrims rush was swelling every year and they were facing several hardships due to congested roads. It is time for the government to take up road-widening works in a time-bound programme and provide separate shopping complexes for the traders living along the road, they said.
