JOIN USIn the middle of Kailash Colony and Nehru place, adjoining Amar Colony there is a busy Kalka Devi Marg that leads you to a congested and squalid corridor of a marketplace where you can see the swankiness of the city vanishing behind you.
The streets are as dirty as a pigsty. A Metrolife reporter witnesses the same person tripping over a flat surface three times, once over a banana peel, next was an orange and the last was a polythene-bag filled with food.
The well-known Garhi studio lies broken down within the walls of the DDA park, but a sculptor was still at his work.
The area suffers from water shortage, which adds to the problem of filth.
Pawan Siradhana, a resident, standing near a juice shop outside the park, says, “The motor is fitted in the beginning of the lane. So the further you go down the lane, you will find irregular water supply. There should be another line following somewhere in the middle, to divert the water further but there is none. That is why the place cannot be cleaned up.”
Kala Devi runs a grocery store and her main worry is the rains, “There is so much trash all over the streets. When it rains all the drains open up by themselves and the water reaches your knees and comes inside the shops. I have faced a huge loss because all my products rot or are lost,” she says with exasperation. “You wait and see, the drains just magically open when it rains,” she adds.
There are long lanes of grocery shops, meat shops and eateries, but the filth has gathered mosquitos and flies. Every fifteen steps one can find a piece of meat swarming with flies.
Alok Goel, Vijay Kumar and Shyam Lal are meeting for a chat in the evening, and tell Metrolife that their main concern is swine flu. Shyam Lal’s seven-and-a-half-year-old daughter died of an unknown disease last October and he suspects it was swine flu.
“People are opening up new meat shops adding to the shops that are already there. They are big people, so the landowners let them do whatever they want. But also it is increasing the swine flu threat,” says Lal.
Lal adds, “These guys are taking over our colonies, we are a Gujjar community and this village was allotted to our people, but this is a new phenomenon that these butchers have shifted in with us. We are all vegetarians.”
A solid layer of trash covers the whole surface beneath one’s feet at Garhi. Since the water tankers don’t visit, the residents say they can’t come together to clean up the mess