Nightmarish experience

Nightmarish experience
By Poornima Nataraj
The project has caused enough damages to the roads, drain lines and water supply lines on CMH Road. Water supply lines also seem to have broken at many places and the sewage water has seeped into ground water.

Once it eventually materialises, Bangalore’s ‘Namma Metro’ promises to make travelling through the City a breeze. But going by the pace of the work, that should be years away. Till then Bangaloreans may have to endure the inconveniences of the construction both on and off the roads. Traders and residents on CMH Road in Indiranagar have already got a taste of that. This is a reality check:

A leisurely place to walk and shop for decades, CMH Road was the place to be for most Indiranagar residents. But today, the road looks battered, the barricades of the Metro project having encroached the road users’ paths from both sides. The residents, despite their repeated protests against the alignment, might have endured it all if not for the construction cutting into their sleep time as well.

Residents complained that the work carries on even after midnight and sometimes starts during the wee hours of the morning. They had a tough time coping with the noise made by the drilling machines. As A R Kulkarni, a local resident put it, “We do not object to the Metro Rail coming-up on CMH Road, but there is a time for everything. The work continues till late night sometimes starts at three in the morning. But we do not see much work happening during the day".
















For Priya S Kumar, a civil engineering student, staying too close to all this chaos, concentrating for her examinations had become tough: "I have my exams coming up and I usually prefer to study in the morning, but am not able to do so because of the noise in wee hours. I cannot even ride my two-wheeler as the road has been damaged severely."

As the Metro Rail project is vast and involves huge pillars to be erected, residents say drilling work occurs in the morning. John Michael, a local resident, had this to say: "You should stand on CMH Road at three in the morning, the whole place and the locality vibrates due to drilling, we cannot sleep because of the tremors".

Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation (BMRC) engineers Dany Thomas and Hegga Reddy denied that work was being carried out during the night. They said that filing or the drilling work happens during the day and most of the concreting work happens in the night. “We do not work from night 10 to morning 6,” added Dany Thomas.
Yet, when Deccan Herald spoke to some of the workers of Metro Rail about why they work in the night, the workers mostly from Bihar say, that they just followed the instructions given to them by their superiors.

Dr Suryavanshi said, "The pillars were constructed to a certain level, but one day I saw workers, breaking the pillars to ground level. Why do they do double-work, I do not understand".

The project has caused enough damages to the roads, drain lines and water supply lines on CMH Road. Thanks to all the digging, sewage water have started getting into the storm water drains, and at places, have started overflowing on the main road.

Water supply lines also seem to have broken at many places and the sewage water has seeped into ground water. Kamal, who has a well inside his house, complains of increase in mosquitoes. He says, "I cannot use the well water in my house, as you can see an algae formation on the top layer". BWSSB AEE Prabhakar said that they were not aware of the situation as no one has complained about the leaking drains. "Whenever a big project like Metro Rail work is going on, the work would affect others lines too," he added.

Lack of coordination between departments has apparently turned CMH road into a mess.