KTR Urges Rajnath Singh To Reopen Cantonment Roads

Telangana Municipal and Industries Minister K T Rama Rao today urged the Centre to reopen the closed roads in the Cantonment area in Secunderabad.

In a letter to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Rao said that the defence authorities were causing a lot of convenience to the people of the city.

KTR said that the frequent and mostly sudden and unannounced closure of important roads such as the AOC roads and the Gough Road on previous occasions had resulted in widespread resentment among the citizens.

Taking cognizance of these genuine concerns of the citizens, the Ministry of Defence had issued a Standard Protocol to be followed by the local military authorities in initiating the process for the closing of roads in the accordance with the provisions of the Cantonment Act, 2006, duly factoring in the emergent security needs of the army.

The local authorities of the Secunderabad Cantonment had prima facie without following the SOP shut down four important roads - Allahabad Gate, Gough Road, Wellington Road and Ordinance Road - for ten days in July 2020 citing a surge in Covid-19 cases in the city.

Lakhs of commuters from localities including Yapral, Kowkur, Bollarum and Trimulgherry using those roads either to go to work or their residences faced much hardship, he said.

There were about 25 public roads in the Secunderabad Cantonment area which were prone to such arbitrary closures for traffic, Rao said. He claimed that all these roads were open to the public since their inception, and that some of them were older than 100 years.

Most of these roads lay in a narrow strip of land which extended approximately 10 km in the north-south direction along the arterial Rajiv Rahadari Highway. Closure of these roads would cut off the north-eastern areas of the city from this arterial road, which was their main mode of access to the rest of the city. Over 10 lakh citizens would be affected on a daily basis, Rao said.

Further, these roads were being used by farmers from villages in the eastern areas of Nagaram, Kapra etc to access markets to dispose their produce in places including Risala Bazar, Bolarum Bazar, Pioneer Bazar, Doveton Bazar, Lal Bazar, etc - all of which are located on the western side of the Cantonment, he informed the Defence Minister.

The minister expressed displeasure at the "arbitrary and random decisions" to close roads by the defense officials, and appealed to Singh to ensure that all the roads in the Secunderabad Cantonment area were reopened for public use without any delay.