In the 67 years since independence, the Anantapur municipality town managed to add just two new overbridges and a few traffic islands, and nothing else of note.
The Anantapur town had a bridge known as the ‘iron bridge’ that connected the old town and the new town, which opened in November 1937. By the time of independence, the town had nothing more than a few bullock carts and rickshaws drawn by men and fewer cycles.
In the late 1960s, what the railway overbridge came up in the new town, near the clock tower.
It was only forty years later that another bridge was built – the one over the railway line near the TTD marriage hall.
From the days when only a few tens of bullock carts plied in the town, to today’s few tens of thousands of two-wheelers and a few thousand cars, the administration has been able to add a mere two bridges as the only infrastructure to manage traffic, leading to unmanageable traffic snarls. Such blockades are common near Satagiri circle, clock tower and the iron bridge, and appear more becoming of Bangalore than Anantapur.
