HYDERABAD: Imagine a kitchen where all the ingredients have been readied and well arranged for a grand luncheon, but there is no stove to cook on. The hit song of the late 1990s Aata hai, dal hai, chawal hai, choolha nahin hai from the Bollywood movie Jhooth Bole Kauwa Kaate was written keeping just that in mind by the lyricist. A similar situation was witnessed during Union Tourism Minister G Kishan Reddy’s padayatra in the twin cities on Wednesday.
In order to find out the problems of the city dwellers, Kishan has been on a padayatra for the past week or so. On Wednesday, a public hearing of sorts was arranged at the community hall in Adikmet Basthi, where he was to listen to the people’s grievances and hold the concerned officials accountable.
All the officials were there, and people came out in fairly good numbers to represent their issues, but the mike didn’t work. As the officials introduced themselves one after the other, it was evident that there was something wrong in the sound system. As Kishan was getting ready to let the people speak, the mike went off totally.
Having lost his patience, at one point Kishan wanted to call the meeting off, but then regained his cool and took representations from the people, and directed the concerned officials to address those issues.Among the aggrieved was NSR Murthy, who had served in the Indian Air Force as the squadron leader before retirement. His grievance was that for the past two decades, the drainage near his house at Vidyanagar post office has been flowing on the main road that leads to Ramnagar Gundu.Fed up with official neglect, he approached Kishan to pour out his woes.
The official concerned from HMWS&SB informed Kishan that he was inducted into the role just few months ago and was not aware of the problem.“The threat to people’s lives in our area due to the sewage flowing on the roads is worse than the threat from dengue and Coronavirus. Just dump a heap of sand, a few cement bags and some crushed stones in front of your house and in no time the local corporator will appear questioning whether you have obtained construction permission or not. But no corporator comes to find out our problems,” he told Express.
Community hall being misused, say people
The community hall where the meeting was a grievance in itself. The colony residents informed Reddy that the G+1 community hall with a built-up area of 12,000 sq ft was constructed before 2014 through former MP M Anjan Kumar Yadav’s MPLads funds to the tune of Rs 1 crore, but because of no ownership of management system in place, the people were unable to use it for social ev-ents, and as a result, the premises has turned into a den for anti-social elements to thrive.
Kishan asked the community members to constitute a committee to run the hall, but the problem was that everybody wants to be the president of the committee, which has become a hurdle for constituting one.
“In case the committee can’t be formed, at least tenders can be called for and the highest bidder can be allowed to run the hall which can be a source of revenue for GHMC,” opined Kranthi Ramana, an advocate who represented the issue to Kishan. There is also a community library on the premises, which once used to be an open ground with two volleyball courts.