Poor civic sense coupled with apathy from the Chimbel panchayat to resolve the problems plaguing the Indira Nagar locality has turned the entire area into a health hazard zone.
Visit Indira Nagar and be prepared to find garbage strewn all over the locality as garbage collection has stopped since the past several months, despite the Chimbel panchayat awarding a tender to collect garbage.
To make matters worse, the garbage ~ which includes plastic waste, is then set ablaze thereby creating a health hazard to the residents.
The clogged drains have added to the problems as residents prefer to dump their garbage inside these drains and the accumulated sewage becomes a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, which improves the chances of spread of vector-borne diseases like malaria, dengue, chikungunya, etc.
Further, several water pipelines are situated inside drainages and this further raises the risk of water contamination. In the past two months alone, several households were affected as water was contaminated due to a pipeline running below the drainage.
When residents were contacted, they squarely blamed the panchayat for neglecting Indira Nagar. “The politicians come only during election time to beg for votes,” they added. However, nobody was willing to provide their names as they feared repercussion.
A panch of Indira Nagar, Rosy Uttikuri, however, blamed the panchayat authorities for the state of affairs at Indira Nagar. “My pleas to collect garbage and clean the clogged drainages have never been heard by the panchayat authorities,” she alleged.
“Whenever I requested the panchayat authorities to provide me labourers for de-silting drains, my pleas were not heard,” she further added.
When contacted, acting Sarpanch Chandrakant Kunkolkar could only say that the panchayat has already started the process to float a tender for de-silting drains in Chimbel, the work for which will commence before the monsoon.
“We will also float a tender for garbage collection for the year 2014-15,” he added.
However, when questioned why the garbage is not collected periodically when the tender for 2013-14 is already awarded, Kunkolar assured that he would direct the contractor to begin garbage collection.
