Public irked as road laid sans moving bike

CHENNAI: An illegally laid cement road in a busy commercial hub in Vellore town has created headaches for Vellore Corporation officials who are already stressed out regarding Chief Minister MK Stalin’s visit to Vellore on Wednesday.

Residents of BSS Koil Street were surprised when they woke up on Tuesday morning to see a shabbily laid cement road with “no action being taken to mark the drains and manholes in the area,” according to local trader Subash Jain.

“They laid the road around 4 am and in their haste to complete the work, they did not even remove parked two wheelers or shoo away livestock which muddied the laid road with their hoofs,” Subash Jain added.

When the owner of the stuck in cement two-wheeler and others created a ruckus the contractor sent workers. They broke the set cement and released the two wheeler and then scooted after plastering the spot,” another trader said.

When asked about this, Vellore Corporation Mayor Sujata Anand said, “I pulled up the Commissioner and the engineer for this lapse and demanded action against the contractor responsible. The bill for this work should not be cleared by the Corporation.”

However, Corporation Commissioner S Ashok Kumar had a different take. Talking to DT Next he said, “first locals need to understand that the road was not laid by the Corporation at all. If the local body proposed to take up this road we would have prepared an estimate based on which tenders would have been called for and then only would this work be taken up.”

Continuing he added, “the road was obviously laid by a local contractor at the behest of some political persons and so when I accosted the contractor whom we were able to identify immediately, the latter expressed regret for the work and said it would not be repeated.”

Asked if the contractor could be blacklisted for shoddy work, the Commissioner said, “the contractor can be blacklisted only if it was an officially tendered work.”