TEAM HERALD
PANJIM: Imagine a day when you have to stand on a stool and jump over your neighbour’s compound wall to enter your own house, especially when you have to do it at the age of 70 and are a resident of a posh residential area.
That’s what Ruth Aguiar (70) a grandmother has been doing for the past two days. And then when she could bear it no longer she came to Herald with her tale of woe.
“For the past two weeks the contractor has dug the area in front of my gate and blocked my entry. For the past few days I went to my sister’s house and with a help of a stool crossed over the compound wall to my side,” Aguiar told Herald, recounting that even the police expressed their apparent helplessness at giving her some relief.
“On April 17, I called the PCR who advised me to lodge a complaint which was done and prompt action was taken by the police sub inspector and a path was created with instructions to the contractor that it could be removed after informing me,” she said. But later the police changed their tune and said they could not interfere as this was a government project.
And that’s not all, her water supply has been cut off and her nephew threatened.
Sad but true, this is happening in the capital city – in Dona Paula a few metres from the Raj Bhawan. And residents watch and suffer as the contractors lord it over the roads, disrupting water supply of entire colonies and cutting the telephone lines of another.
The work is being done in an unplanned manner and despite crores of rupees being spent, no thought is given to the daily lives of the citizens for which this development work is being purportedly done and who are paying for the work.
