VIJAYAWADA: Residents of Undavalli, the village in which chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu has his residence on Krishna river bank, are afraid their houses would be razed to make way for construction of Expressway.
They say that their fear stems from the fact that the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) usually does something which is entirely different from what it says. “Though Municipal Administration Minister P Narayana had said that very few houses would be lost, it may not be the case when the road is actually laid,” Dr Gade Kanna Rao Naidu, who lives in the village, says. Taking a serious exception to Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu describing farmers in Undavalli as “useless”, Dr Naidu said that they may not be as astute or as clever as the Chief Minister himself is, but they were not useless.
When the road is laid, it would wipe out places like Ganapati Sachidananda Ashram, ISKCON Temple, Vedadri Tapovanam, Omkara Dhyanamandiram, Nature Cure Prakruti Vaidyasala, Chaitanya Tapovanam, Krishna Ananda Ashram and Mahavir Jain Goshala among others.
He said that he had filed several objections with the CRDA on the road it proposed to lay through Undavalli. The 50-metre wide road from National Highway No: 5 (Varadhi) passing over railway lines, old NH5, Krishna Main Canal and PWD workshop to meet the southern flood bank road and road dividing the village of Undavalli into two will wipe out two burial grounds of Hindus. The road will erase all temples in blatant violation of change of Status of Religious Structures as on August 15, 1947. This road also contravenes the provisions for protection of archeological sites and Ancient Monuments Act of 2010. The road destroys the small caves adjacent to famous Undavalli caves, he argued.
He maintained that his house on Undavalli Karakatta has been constructed in 1935, even before the flood bank came up but now finds it difficult to reach his four acre field as he has to cross the road that leads to the Chief Minister’s residence. More than often, he would be asked to wait by the police for the Chief Minister’s convoy to pass.
“Already power connection to my field has been cut because I did not give my land under land pooling to the CRDA and now we are facing the prospects of our houses being razed,” he said.