Patients are ferried to hospitals in charpoys, parents find it hard to get a groom for their daughters and house owners find it difficult to sell their flats. Reason: the pathetic condition of roads.
Believe it or not, all these have happened not in some remote village in Durgapur, but in Bengal’s industrial town.
“We usually ferry patients who need to be taken to hospitals on charpoys as the roads are so pathetic that the ambulance cannot reach our home,” said Binay Samaddar, a resident at Sukanta Pally of ward 43 of the Durgapur Municipal Corporation.
Residents here alleged the road was not repaired for the past two years.
Asked if they lodged complaints with the local civic body representative, Samaddar said they did not have that option as the tenure of the elected civic board expired three years ago and no election was held since then.
Parbati Mukherjee, a resident of the same area, is facing a problem of a different kind. She is finding it difficult to get her daughter married as the prospective grooms and their families are not willing to visit her house, given the bad roads.
“I am not getting a groom for my daughter. Prospective grooms and their parents are unwilling to come to our house to see my daughter. The roads are that bad,” she said.
A resident of Steel Park area in ward 26 is finding it hard to get a buyer for her flat as the road approaching her housing complex is a “virtual death trap”.
“I am looking for a prospective buyer of my flat as I need to sell it urgently. But I am not getting buyers because of the pathetic road condition. One of the prospective buyers, who was coming to visit my flat, fell off his two-wheeler and suffered injuries,” said Pampa Chatterjee, the Steel Park resident.
The residents’ associations in the area have appealed to the administrative board running the day to day affairs of the town since 2022 in absence of an elected civic board.
“I have urged the civic body in writing to repair the road leading to our housing complex from the main road. I don’t know when our problems will be looked into. There is no elected civic body in our town for the past three years,” said Manas Dutta, general secretary of the Aalingan Welfare Association.
The 700-metre-long approach road was repaired before last year’s Pujas but it appeared to be non-existent this monsoon, residents said.
Trinamool had won the civic body for two consecutive elections since 2012. In the last election held in 2017, Trinamool secured an absolute majority amid allegations of mass rigging.
As the elections have not been held to the Durgapur civic body for three years, there has been no proper road maintenance in this duration in the town. Almost all roads in Durgapur are death traps.
An engineer in the civic body said road repairs did not last because of Durgapur’s faulty drainage system.
“Before repairing roads, we need to update the drainage system in the town. Waterlogging is a major problem in some parts of the town which caused severe damage to the roads within a short span of relaying them,” the engineer said.
A section of residents alleged systemic corruption.
“It is not easy here to get a road repair contract without paying a cut to ruling party leaders. If a contractor has to pay handsome cut money to get a repairing job, he will compromise on the quality of work. Ultimately, we suffer,” said a resident not willing to come on record.
Chairperson of the board of administrators Anindita Mukherjee, also Durgapur’s former mayor, claimed that restoration work of the damaged roads would start after monsoon and end before the Pujas. “We’ve already allocated funds for the job,” she said. Durga Puja starts on September 28.
The CPM and BJP demanded immediate repair of roads.
“The civic body is run by a board of administrators and not an elected body. The civic poll was due in 2022, but the state government is unwilling to announce an election here and people are suffering. The roads are beyond usable,” said Siddhartha Bose, a
CPM activist.
BJP leader Amitabha Banerjee echoed Bose.
Trinamool leader Uttam Mukherjee said the people here were “happy” with the intensive development work in Durgapur. “Opposition parties are trying to make an issue out of nothing,” he claimed.