Accustomed to wide roads lined with trees and fairly clean surroundings, the people of Basavanagudi are waking up to a different reality of late. Visit North Public Square road, one of the oldest in the locality, and you see the change that has crept in for the worse. Lined with houses, restaurants, apartments, a school, a post office and several banks, the road was until recently considered comfortable considering the facilities it had to offer the residents.
But over the last month most have begun avoiding it as the BBMP has left it dug up, making the lives of pedestrians and commuters miserable in the process. Worse, the muddy stretch becomes slushy after a few spells of rain, compounding their troubles. But despite the ordeal the residents and commuters go through every day, the BBMP has shown no sign of repairing it. The vehicles that have no choice but to use it, are routinely caught in traffic jams as most cars and buses need to travel cautiously on the uneven road.
If things were not bad enough, the garbage crisis that has been haunting the city in recent weeks has turned the road into a dumpyard. "Although district in-charge minister, R. Ashok and mayor Mr D.Venkatesh Murthy use the road frequently, they dont seem to care as no one has arrived to clear it," complain the residents, who say they have brought the matter to the notice of the BBMP and other civic agencies several times, but have received no response. Mrs. Nalini S.R. Ghosh, an employee with a private firm, who lives here, regrets that despite the presence of many apartments and houses on the road, nothing has been done to make it livable again.