Sheela Madhukumar shudders every time she looks at the dug-up service road right in front of her eatery near Vyttila signal where buses take a deviation to enter the mobility hub.
With just a month left for her daughter’s wedding, her business has taken a hit because of the construction of a culvert to resolve the water logging problem in the area.
Traffic through the area remains disrupted owing to the partially blocked road, which turns in to a dust bowl making life tough for pedestrians and shop owners like Sheela.
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Mosquito menace
“Our regular customers have gone for good. We remain closed for four days last week. But we couldn’t afford it. The timing of the work has been devastating for us,” she said. To make matters worse, the drainages, the slabs of which were removed for the construction of the culvert, have become a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Pradeep Kumar, an employee at Naval Base who often passes through the road on his two-wheeler, said that the work had created hardships for motorists who drive through the RSAC Road, near the hub, to get to the highway.
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“There is no doubt that the culvert must be built to solve the water logging problem on the service road. But it should be completed in a time bound manner. Since this road remains blocked, the parallel road in front of the Ponnurunni Temple is getting increasingly crowded,” he said.
Dusty roads
M.P. Suresh, running a travel agency along the service road, said dusty winds were the biggest irritant. He, however, was patient about the work saying that solid work would take time. “Besides, those like us who have to live with stinking water complete with refuse from the nearby hotels floating around during monsoon would never complain about this work. The culvert is the only solution to our monsoon ordeal,” he said.
For Jose Kattookaren, who has been running an automobile spare parts shop in the locality for the last nine years, the thought of stinking black water during monsoon makes him tolerate the current dip in his business owing to the work. “Hopefully, it will be completed before monsoon. Traffic through the road remains hit. Only the other day, a tempo got stuck near the roadblock where there is hardly room for a big vehicle to pass through,” he said.
Corporation councilor of the locality Sunitha Dixon said the work could have been completed much before had the traffic police given permission to carry out the work by completely blocking the road. “We will need another 20 days while the entire work could have been completed within 20 days. A block in the pipe connected to the drainage near the Bevco outlet at the beginning of the service road was creating water logging problems in the area necessitating the construction of a culvert,” she said.