With just a day to go for the prestigious Invest Karnataka-2016, Bengaluru face-lift operation is going on in full-swing. In addition to this, the transport minister has also issued a ban on private vehicles entering the central business district to ease traffic for the next 5 days.
On Monday, there were at least 30 people working on beautification of roads leading to Commercial Street and Mahatma Gandhi road in Bengaluru. Workers could be seen laying footpaths, grooming plants on dividers, cleaning main roads and painting road markers.
“The work has been going on since last Monday. We start around 6:30 in the morning and take a break during peak hours. We resume work again by 12 pm. We work until it evening just before peak hour,” says Jaiyanna, a painter. Most of the workers being migrants, had even brought their toddlers to work.
Kamesh Selvaraj, a sugarcane juice seller near Commercial Street said that every now and then truckloads of tiles on the footpath in the mornings.
“These people just leave the tiles here and go. They don’t repair the footpaths. If you walk onthis road, you will find loads of old tiles stacked up among the new ones. Those were left here just a few months ago and have been damaged in the rain,”Selvaraj said.
Asked about the two toddlers spotted on the divider on MG road, opposite Rangoli gallery, Sujatha, one of children’s mother said that they have no choice other than to bring the children along as there is no one to take care of them at home.
Transport minister Ramalinge Reddy had issued a ban on private vehicles from entering central business district. Which means over 3,000 buses will be banned from entering inside a radius of 10km around Vidhana Soudha until February 5.
Reddy’s has been criticised by Karnataka BJP president Prahlad Joshi, who mocked his order by reportedly calling it as an order of a “Tughlaq Darbar”.
In a press statement on Sunday, Joshi said that there was no rationale behind the ban because the government had not clarified on what the connection between the ban orders and the investors’ meet was.