With toll collection stopped, the 27-km-long inner Ring Road, connecting Uthangudi and Kappalur, wears a neglected look with potholes and huge craters dotting it.
After the High Court instructed the urban local body not to collect toll fee for vehicles in November 2014, the Corporation withdrew its staff.
However, in the last seven months maintenance of the two-way road has been left much to be desired. This is the only stretch on Kanyakumari-Chennai highway without a four-way road. While vehicle drivers, especially truck and bus drivers, often complain of inconvenience in driving because of lack of width, the presence of too many dangerous curves is a curse to them.
The deep and wide potholes on the road, especially at the bends and sharp curves, add to the perils of driving on this stretch.
The abandoned toll plazas are in worse condition with craters, which are more than one foot deep. It is a common sight that bus drivers proceeding towards Tirumangalam avoid the two lanes on the left side at the plaza, but take the opposite lane to avoid the ‘gorge’. “It may damage the axle,” a TNSTC driver complained.
This practice adds to danger on the road.
Mayor V.V. Rajan Chellappa said that the Ring Road ceased to be that of Corporation property. The State government had instructed the Corporation to hand over the road to the Highways Department to enable widening work at a cost of Rs. 200 crore. “It is in the process of handing it over. Though we have got a huge corpus of funds in the Ring Road account, we cannot use it for repair and patch works. We have sought clearance from the highway authorities to allow the Corporation to take up repair works, before the road is formally handed over (to them),” Mr. Chellappa told The Hindu .
The Corporation had around Rs. 35 crore in its Ring Road account, he added.