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This sign board is situated opposite to the New Cinema theater. Until a few years ago this yellow board was glittering, giving out information about distances of various towns from Cuddalore. But now it has got rusted and damaged and the information is not clearly visible. This board is now being used for pasting posters and to support digital banners.

Another sign board in a similar state is near the water filling office at the South end of Nethaji road.

Replacing these old boards with new green colored board of reflecting type will help in travellers getting quick information while passing through Cuddalore .

Repetition of this problem can be prevented if stern action is taken against the offenders who paste posters over it. Only if this offence is considered on par with destruction of any other public property and the offenders (either the people pasting it or the people for whom the poster is printed) are punished, these type of making the town uglier could be prevented.

With the ongoing works for laying underground drainage going on in many parts of Cuddalore, the slow progress of the work is bringing much hardship to the residents of Srinivasa Pillai Street situated in Thirupadhiripuliyur.

Above is the rough map of the street which is situated near the Thirupadhiripuliyur Police station. For the residents of Srinivasa Pillai Street to move out, there are four exit points. With the drainage canal laying work being done in Bodi Chetty street and Sanjeevi Naidu street, the exit points 2, 3 and 4 are blocked and people find it difficult to move out only through the point 1. More than 5 weeks have passed since these ways were cut off for regular vehicular movement and the laying of culvert at these three points are yet to start.

This is the exit point 2, which connects to the Bodi Chetty street. The passage was disconnected 5 weeks back and the culvert construction is yet to start.
Elderly people and school children are the most affected and there has been many instances where children have fallen into this sewerage while crossing on the temporary narrow slab.
The exit points 3 & 4 have been disconnected for the past five weeks.

Underground Drainage work in Srinivasa Pillai Street

The work for under ground drainage at Srinivasa Pillai street was started four weeks back. So far the initial stage of constructing the manhole is completed for half of the street on the Northern side.
The mud taken out from these pits had not been cleared for the past four weeks and during rains it makes the little existing passage more slippery with two wheeler riders losing control and falling down and four wheelers getting struck up in the mud.

As the drainage is not being cleared in a regular manner for long time the level of drain water has come up resulting in sewage flowing into drainage line of one of the houses. The above picture shows mud removed from the sewerage by the resident.

A pit for constructing manhole was dug up and two cart loads of the mud dumped at this private place. Since it was not cleared and the place is needed for parking vehicles, the people themselves have taken the task of levelling the mud.

With the materials required for laying drainage pits lying haphazardly for more than a month, people are finding it difficult to use the road.

Timely intervention is needed for building these three culverts, removal of debris and moving out the mud promptly once it is dug up is highly required to avoid hindrance to the residents and users of the Srinvasa Pillai Street.

Most parts of Cuddalore was without any drainage facility for all these years. But all in a sudden drainage construction on either side of the roads has begun, while the underground drainage construction work is already in progress.

During the drainage line construction municipal water pipe lines are badly damaged, and no proper replacements are made in most cases. As a result water keeps leaking for for months and sometimes year together. In even worser cases drainage mixes with the drinking water.

The picture below shows the drainage construction work at Bodi Chetty Street in Thirupadhiripuliyur. Just two years back a drainage line constructed in this place. Now a new line is being built demolishing the old one. I don’t understand the purpose behind this. I fact none of the residents of the street does.

This street is one of the oldest streets in the town. The drainage level is raised (probably because the road level is going to be raised). Old houses in this street will go below the road level. When there is a rain, water from road will flow into drainage line and from drainage lines into these houses.

Broken municipal water pipes leaking

Related link:
Drinking water in Cuddalore - Cuddalore Online

Kammianpet shows visible development within a year of completion of the link bridge connecting Semandalam. There are abundance vacant spaces in this area which can very well be utilised for various public buildings and for the commercial development of the town.

This place is easily accessible from many parts of the town which makes it suitable site for public buildings and government offices. This is a potential place for the proposed Integrated Courts Complex and an Integrated Offices Complex. An Integrated Offices Complex may help shift the offices functioning in rented buildings. It would be a great relief for various departments which pays huge sum as rent.

The development of the locality must be planned and a design layout must be drafted out to guide the development. The place is also suitable for bringing up commercial establishments. Government can even come up with a multistoryed market similar to the one proposed for Erode.

As a first step to increase the more activity along this stretch, ‘Share Auto’ service and the bus service must be introduced.

A long sighted initiative must be taken for traffic planning. Necessary land must be acquired and reserved along the road and railway routes, before the value of the land sores up.

As the value of the land rises encroachments becomes an major issue. Real estate owners tries to make most of the land: their own land and the public land. Already some of them have illegally occupied the river bank with help of corrupt officials. This illegal occupation is done along the south west corner of the bridge, which is shown in photo. Note: The photograph was taken several months back, now the place looks completely different.

A distant view of Kammianpet-Semandalam bridge as seen from the land which was recently converted into plots.

The river bund road connecting Jawan’s Bhavan and Kammianpet has further increased the land value. This was a dreamproject for decades. The inaccessible part of the town is about to get a good access. De-congesting the roads is the direct reason behind the project, but the resulting development along is this stretch will be unimaginable. A similar bund road from Kammianpet and Padirikuppam would nurture the ongoing developement process. Though it may not be economically viable to carry out such a project at this stage, keeping the river bank safe from illegal occupiers is vital.

Note: The above photos were taken several months back

Related links:

Gedilam bank to be raised - The Hindu

Bridge across Gedilam coming up: Bedi - The Hindu

For a long time I have been wondering why people do not use pedestrian footpaths along roads. I have been observing various reasons why people are not using sidewalks. Here are some of them (in no specific order) in brief,

• electric posts, telephone posts in the footpath,
• narrow footpaths,
• shops protruding into the footpath,
• encroachments of the footpath by shops, footpath vendors, hawkers,
• people waiting in the footpath (in large number) for buses and other means of transport
• open manholes in the middle of the footpath,
• tiles of the foothpath broken for laying cables, wires and desilting drainages and not replaced properly,
• using footpath to store construcion materials for the nearby construcion site,
• footpaths too high from the level of the road for senior citizens and children to step into,
• too many discontinuities in the footpath (due to both avoidable and unavoidable reason)
• using footpath to park vehicles,
• people convening regularly for gossiping (I regularly notice this peculiar scence in Lawrence Road),
• people never use an obnoxious footpath. When people stop using it, it further become a place for wrong deeds - it becomes a cycle (this is more common for footpaths along long perimeter wall) .