CHENNAI:I f you were to take a bird’s eye view, you would find a narrow canal winding through the culvert, pouring into a garbage-loaded channel and disappearing. From Madhavaram High Road, St Mary’s Road turns in and leads to a cluster of houses on both sides, and about 40m away begins the women’s college premises bounded by a fairly high wall and trees aplenty inside and out. Some of the trees have been wrenched out by the roots recently by Vardah, the cyclonic storm.
One cannot miss the sudden narrowing of the 40-feet wide road to a barely 10 feet width, just enough for a single truck or a bus to squeeze through. The architect of this marvel is a set of two buildings that have gobbled up the road.
Each day is an ordeal for the college bus driver who must turn into the campus at least 10 minutes before the day begins with the regular assembly and prayers. It is impossible for any other vehicle — even a two-wheeler or a bicycle — to go along the encroached stretch when the bus uses the available space. Not just a bus, even two cars moving in opposite directions cannot pass each other along that roughly 20m stretch.
A tea shop and a tiny grocery outlet abut the road. It has the inevitable crowd of tea enthusiasts enjoying the early morning tea and watching the tide of colourfully-dressed smart young women heading to college.
The kink, with a thermometer-like bend, is hard to negotiate even by motorcycles and cycles. Everyday vehicles pile up for passage rights but usually peace and tolerance prevails.
That the buildings have violated the norms there is no doubt. When the media photographers tried to capture the peculiar bottleneck, they were shooed away by the locals. It proved that the locals were aware of the violation of building norms and encroachment of carriageway; and would fight tooth and nail to keep the issue under wraps. That the civic body seems blissfully ignorant of the violation would seem surprising. After all the tax collectors knock on each door on St Mary’s Road for property tax every year.