Planting paddy on potholes
Two Telangana road protests — one with a chair in a flooded street, one with saplings and ‘fishing’ rods — asked for the same basic thing: start the work. The complaint is on record; the paperwork and the officials’ answers are not.
Waterlogged potholes on roads in Kamareddy and Suryapet districts prompted protests calling for repairs.
News, infrastructure
A BRS councillor sat in a flooded stretch of the Kamareddy–Rajanna Sircilla road on Saturday while party workers in Suryapet planted paddy in waterlogged potholes and pretended to fish — both aimed at one target: get road repairs moving, according to a report published Sunday. The actions were held in Kamareddy town and on the Tungaturthi–Suryapet main road respectively, the report said.
G Laxminarayana, identified as a BRS councillor from Kamareddy’s 46th division, said repeated complaints to Roads & Buildings and municipal officials had produced assurances but no work: “They just give assurances but the works are not taken up,” he is quoted as saying. The same report attributes to him the claim that a culvert should have been built alongside a railway-bridge job and wasn’t.
That’s the on-record part. What’s missing — from any department or the contractor — is the tender, the work order, who owns each stretch, whether a culvert was actually in scope, and a start date for repairs. Older coverage independently recorded rainwater stagnation in parts of Kamareddy in June, but not these protests, and no authority has bothered to explain why people are planting paddy where there should be bitumen.