Milestones bear brunt of Cauvery anger

Farmers and Kannada activists, who have already erased ‘Chennai’ from the milestones along the highway, are now applying a coat of red paint on names of places written in the Devnagiri script.

A coat of paint applied on the milestones in Mandya. — Photo: B. Mahadeva

If you are travelling on the Bengaluru-Mysuru highway and happen to be headed for Tamil Nadu, don’t go by the milestones.

Farmers and Kannada activists, who have already erased ‘Chennai’ from the milestones along the busy highway, are now applying a coat of red paint on names of places written in the Devnagiri script. They want inscriptions in Hindi removed from milestones in protest against the Centre’s failure to find a solution to the decades-old Cauvery water-sharing dispute.

Busy stretch

The highway, which is being upgraded as National Highway 275, is one of the busiest inter-State roads in the country. It connects places such as Ooty, Salem, Sathyamangalam, Sathy, Wayanad, Mananthavady, Kozhikode, Sultan Bathery, and other towns in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. At least two lakh vehicles ply on this stretch every day.

As a result, names of places between Chennai and Ooty, Bengaluru and Mysuru, Ooty and Tirupati, Sathyamangalam and Mumbai, and some other major towns, were written in Hindi on the milestones. But farmers and Kannada activities applied a coat of red paint on the Hindi inscriptions while erasing the names of Chennai, Ooty and some other places of Tamil Nadu, sources in the National Highways Authority of India told

The Hindu .

Such disfigurement of milestones was also observed along National Highway 48, the Srirangapatna-Bidar highway, the Kanakapur-Mysuru road and some other major roads, a police officer said.

While leaders of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha welcomed the protest, NHAI sources said the authorities would restore the inscriptions.