Bengaluru

Atal Bihari Vajpayee Road

Malibu Rising City

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BBMP

Central Business District

Yes,is a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) city but we bet you didn’t think our DIY-ness would extend to fixing roads.Well, believe it.The once muddy, messy, unmotorable one-km stretch that connectsand Channasandra Main Road in Kadugodi ward in east Bengaluru has been paved by the efforts of residents from Krishna Kuteer and. This after they raised complaints over four years with the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, and were ignored.Krishna Kuteer has 47 villas while Malibu Rising City has around 150 apartments. Each of them contributed Rs 500 each and pooled Rs 2 lakh to make this road motorable.The unmotorable road was perhaps one of the most neglected in the Kadugodi ward. For the around 800 residents, who had to use this road to commute towards Whitefield Railway Station or Channasandra, it was an everyday struggle, one that got worse in the monsoon. During the summer, clouds of dust would rise from the muddy road, and in the rainy season, this road would turn into a slushy stretch. Fed up with the daily struggle to navigate this stretch and the apathy of the authorities, the residents took it upon themselves to set right the road.Says M Sunil, a working committee member of Malibu Rising City, “It was very tough to use my four-wheeler during the monsoon. Due to the slush, my car would move to the left and right when I wanted it to move ahead. I have been enduring this stretch for the last two years that I’ve been staying here.”The residents say that during the last year or so they had met elected representatives and submitted a request to fix the road, but in vain. They even used the much-publicised Sahaaya App of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), but all their tickets were closed by theengineers without the problems getting fixed.After making many futile attempts to get the road fixed, the residents decided to make the road motorable with their resources. “We have to thank Malibu Rising City residents for joining hands with us. Now, I am very happy to see the road motorable. It was in a very bad condition for the last four years,’’ said Sajan Abraham, president, Krishna Kuteer Residents’ Association.If it were left to the BBMP, they would have quoted a budget of Rs 15 lakh to fix a road that is one-km long and 40 ft wide, say the residents. But this road was made motorable road with just Rs 2 lakh. The residents got a contractor to supply raw material such as gravel, sand, mud and cement. They then engaged three labourers and a road roller. “Around 10 residents worked along with the labourers for two days,’’ said Abraham.Expressing satisfaction over converting the kutcha road into a motorable one, Sudhakar L, a working committee member of Krishna Kuteer Residents’ Association said that many residents had injured themselves after falling down on the muddy road. “Some of them have lost their mobile phones. School going children were compelled to walk up to the main road when school buses and vans could not ply on this road because it had deteriorated,” said Sudhakar.Though there is a lot to do to make this road like any other road in the, for the residents its a temporary respite and a sense of pride that this is a DIY project. But they can’t shake off the cloud of disappointment that all their taxes have gone down the drain and their elected representatives and the BBMP have let them down.