RS Puram roads to be relaid only after water project work gets over in Sept

Coimbatore: RS Puram residents may have to wait until October to drive on freshly laid tar roads as the city corporation is likely to complete work on laying pipelines for the 24x7 potable water project in the area only by September.
Workers were digging up Robinson Road two weeks ago and a stretch of T V Samy Road extension last week. Corporation officials said they have so far completed laying pipelines for only 9km of the total 42km stretch in RS Puram.
“We will relay the roads only after completion of the water project work. We are now laying the distribution pipelines. In the next stage, we will have to dig up the roads again to lay feeder pipelines. The work will go on until September-end,” a corporation official said.
Due to the ongoing work, driving through RS Puram, one of the city’s commercial-cum-residential hubs in the city, has become a nightmare. Even key roads, which are often used to reach arterial roads, are filled with crevices, bumps and layers of badly done patchwork.
The arterial T V Samy Road, which connects the city to Brooke Bond Road and Ramnagar, is relatively wide. Its condition is also not different. “The road has at least five horizontal crevices and potholes. The road is bumpy from Thadagam Road junction to Mettupalayam Road junction,” said Janani S, a local resident. “These bumps make even short-distance journeys tiring and painful for senior citizens.”
Other roads in the area, including Ramachandran Road, Sambandham Road and Thadagam Road, are also uneven and filled with potholes.
“After digging up the roads for laying water pipelines, they are just closing them. It has worsened the condition of the already bad roads,” said T Karthikeyan, a senior citizen living on Robinson Road. “We can’t even go for walks or slow jogs on the roads now.”