A noiseless campaign for T Nagars techie

CHENNAI: They may not be using loudspeakers or engaging hundreds of people for their campaign, but by choosing to field one among them for the post of local councillor, residents of ward 136 in T Nagar, comprising of 78 streets between Madley and Bazullah Roads, have sent out a loud message to the political class.Coming together under the banner of T Nagar Residents Welfare Association, representatives of various residential organisations in the ward decided to put up their own candidate “after getting fed up with the indifference shown by successive regimes in the past 15 years” towards their issues.  Candidate E Sridharan, a gold medallist in computer engineering, is currently running his own company. While the ward was entirely a residential area in the past, the explosion of commercial establishments in the last 15 years have made living in the area a difficult task, Sridharan said.Foremost among the issues that affect people here is parking. During weekends and festive season, the number of people who visit the shopping centres is so huge that most of them find it hard to locate space to park their vehicles on the main roads. Therefore, most of them end up leaving it in front of houses in the lanes, making it difficult for residents to even come out of their apartments.Sridharan says that this problem became even worse after the flyover was opened on Usman road. “It is a classic example for the nexus between commercial establishments and politicians. The only utility of the bridge is that traders park their supply vehicles under it. On the other hand, it has increased congestion many fold,” he says.Padmini, a resident on Motilal Street, says that garbage has also become a huge issue with the private firm which was handed over the duty of clearing garbage “failing miserably” in doing the work.This apart, issues such as constantly overflowing drainage, which contaminates drinking water, adding layers of concrete indiscriminately on the roads pushing houses to a lower level and flouting of building guidelines by commercial establishments rank high among their grievances.Sridharan says that if voted to power, he would start a call centre so that people could access the councillor directly and register their complaints, adding that the response to his “noise less” campaign has been extremely encouraging.