A basket full of civic woes

BANGALORE: Good road connectivity, clean drinking water, well planned infrastructure and availability of other basic civic amenities are the signs of a good urban life. They residents of Talacauvery and Jakkur Layout of Amruthahalli seem to be missing this.The said that they feel as though they are living in a rural area instead of an urban city.Lack of roads is one of the main issues the locals face.Most roads in the layout are mud roads.“They are dusty when its dry, and slushy during the rains.At no point of time in the year can we say that we have no problems,” said the residents.Asphalted roads seem to be a distant dream for these people.“We have no road to commute, even to reach a small distance we have to take the longest path-less way.When it rains we can't even step out of the house due to a the slush outside.Its almost as if our lives come to a standstill.We have been fighting with the concerned authorities for long now, yet nothing has happened,” said Kaveri (name changed on request).The residents said that they have to trespass through empty plots in order to shorten their distance.Another problem that the locality faces is that of irregular drinking water.According to some only half the locality gets access to drinking water.The BBMP also seems to have a biased attitude when it comes to garbage collection.Waste is collected only from Talacauveri Layout and the service is not provided for the residents of Jakkur Layout.“Though the BBMP van comes regularly, they do not collect garbage from our area.As a result, we have to dump it by the roadsides,” said Lakshmi a resident.Last but not the least of their woes are the fused streetlights.“The area does not have working street lights and it becomes extremely difficult to use the roads at night as they are bumpy and there are plenty of stray dogs to add to our.The locality also has a number of empty plots due to which there are plenty of snakes inhabiting the area,” she added.Narayan Swamy, the BBMP executive engineer for the area said, “Its a private layout so the developers have to take care of it, we will soon try and sort out all the issues.”