The commissioning of the flyovers at Thondayad and Ramanattukara junctions has gained political colour with the District Congress Committee (DCC) alleging that the projects were conceived by the previous UDF government.
DCC president T. Siddique on Friday said the Chief Minister had only inaugurated the structures as the projects had been envisaged during the tenure of then Chief Minister Oommen Chandy as part of the development package for Kozhikode city. The flyovers were part of the City Road Improvement Project to mitigate traffic issues, he added.
He also said the opening of the flyovers was similar to the commissioning of the Panniyankara rail overbridge by Mr. Vijayan in December 2016. Administrative sanction for the project had been given by the UDF government, Mr. Siddique said.
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At the same time, he said the government had declined to invite the elected representatives of the UDF to the function and had violated the protocol to shame M.K. Raghavan, MP, Kozhikode, who had worked tirelessly for making the projects a reality.
Mr. Siddique charged the LDF government with playing politics over development with an eye on the Lok Sabha polls. The people will not approve such tactics to downgrade Mr. Raghavan, he said.
However, presiding over the function, Public Works Minister G. Sudhakaran said the role of governance and conception of a project were vested either with the State or the Centre or with both. An MP has no administrative authority but only a constructive role, he added.
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He also flayed K.C. Venugopal (Alappuzha MP) and N.K. Premachandran (Kollam MP) for projecting themselves and calling meetings on conceiving projects. Maybe they were doing that with the Lok Sabha polls in mind, Mr. Sudhakaran said.