ERODE: She gets into act at three in the morning. She heads straight to Nethaji market, where the family is running a vegetable shop. At 10 a.m. she returns, only to be with the people in her ward and hear their grievances.For 45-year-old councillor Kanchana Palanisamy, this has been the practice the last two years. Now, after being elected to the Corporation for the second term, she feels no need to make any change in this routine.“I should make it to the shop in the wee hours itself, as vegetable trucks arrive early. I have been running this shop the last 25 years,” she told Express.She is into both wholesale and retail business while her husband is running a tomato mandi in the same market. “He is busy most of the time as he is the president of Market Traders Association. Hence, I have to take care of tomato mandi too,” she said.It was her husband who contested Ward No. 45 (Manalmedu area) in 2001 poll, but faced defeat. “But my mother got elected from there in 2006 and she was the first person from AIADMK to win the seat as the ward always elected DMK,” says her son Manikandan.In recent poll, the ward was further expanded with annexation of Ward No. 44. However, Kanchana won defeating sitting councillor Eengur Palanisamy by a margin of 1,485 votes. As a thanksgiving, she erected frontage sheds for two temples in the ward out of own money.“During my last five years, I fulfilled almost all the major needs of the ward including water taps, borewells, roads, cement lanes and streetlights with the help of the civic body,” she proudly remarked.
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