Udupi: To usher local citizens into modern times, all the narrow main roads are getting widened to allow more traffic from town, even within each town. This has resulted in razing down old houses by roadsides, looking like roadside venders’ stalls which get pulled down.
While widened roads bring convenience to street-walkers, pedestrians, and vehicle-owners, there are several householders inconvenienced by such modern trends of wide roads that separate neighbours, and make them strangers in the same locality.
Many houses are requisitioned for roadside amenities created by the householders living on edges of old roads.
Their compound walls are pulled down and seating facilities by the narrow roadsides are bull-dozed by PWD and surface transport authorities.
The aggrieved go to courts seeking justice by way of composition and alternate sites, to re-build their houses. This has happened in Bangalore which got enlarged on villages /towns by acquisition of lands, and in coastal Mangalore, in acquiring many local areas for road developments.
The courts, even the Supreme Court benches, are quick to uphold the principle of wide roads in cities and towns, having a population of 5 lakhs or more. Often, skyways and rail transport surrounding some cities, even underground railways and bust overbridges, are created as in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore or Chennai, when roads could not be widened beyond a certain length/breadth in a town or city.
The old train-ways and electric movements in Mumbai (Fort) and in Calcutta/Delhi, while bringing metro railways above or below the ground level.
In Mangalore, the Kulshekar over bridge was stopped halfway by court petitions of local landholders against land acquisition. A stay order secured in state high court in 2009 could be vacated by SC only in 2011, and so the work on the stunted over bridge has to resume now.
These who oppose widening of roads within the town, because it inconveniences their shopping business or housing constructions, stand the risk of getting their town to tally outside, when by-pass roads are constructed, and a shift in markets takes place around new regions near the by-pass roads.