It is heartening to see denizens preparing to exercise their franchise in the elections to the Municipal Corporation of Tirupati (MCT) after a gap of 18 years.
The town was formed in 1886 and upgraded as selection grade municipality in 1998. As the Tirupati Municipal Council (TMC), it last went to polls in 2002 and the elected panel led by TDP’s K. Sankar Reddy stepped down in 2007 after completing its term.
Though upgraded into a municipal corporation immediately, the temple city never went for polls till date, with hurdles in the form of claims, counter-claims and, eventually, litigations. An entire generation of voters has been denied the chance of choosing its local rulers, leaving the entire process to the discretion of the official machinery. In the absence of politically-elected mayoral candidate, the bureaucrats ‘gave their solutions’ rather than listening to the people’s woes.
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The silver lining, of course, was the absence of political interference for nearly two decades that ensured smooth completion of projects as per deadline, without deviation or jeopardy.
Drainage system
The city’s population was 3,74,260 as per 2011 Census, but the inclusion of major abutting villages almost doubles the number today. Tirupati pioneered the underground drainage (UGD) system and brought almost the entire city under its network today, barring some outlying colonies. However, failure in planning is glaring in the form of insufficient forecast for at least three decades, with most of the drains in the heart of the city getting choked frequently.
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As the town transformed into a city, single floor houses became multi-storeyed complexes or apartments and larger premises metamorphosed into shopping malls, more so in the city’s core area. The smaller pipelines laid nearly two decades back is insufficient to meet the flow of sewage water, making pipe leakage a regular affair. "We often find water seepage and the manholes are kept open frequently, especially in the smaller lanes," points out Sunkara Balasaraswathi, a resident of Chintakayala Street.
There is a vocal demand to dig out the old, smaller pipelines and re-lay the entire network suitable to meet the growing demand.
The city administrators have successfully covered most of the open drains, diverted sewer lines and ensured shifting of solid waste to its vermicompost away from the city. As the brick-based storm water drains were found to be worn out, the civic body took up their replacement with concrete walls across the city. The process is cleared in most of the arterial roads as and when funds were sanctioned, while the internal roads await action.
Similarly, most of the old borewells, dug long back and numbering nearly a dozen in each of the 50 divisions, are in a state of disuse. As the scorching summer has set in, the MCT is focussing more on distribution of water through tankers or encouraging Telugu Ganga connection to every household.