With at least ten homes de­stroyed and oth­ers un­der threat, in­clud­ing a tem­ple, due to de­plorable road in­fra­struc­ture, res­i­dents of Sa­ha­dath Road, Princes Town, protest­ed int he streets on Sat­ur­day morn­ing.

Call­ing for the road and land­slips to be re­paired, the res­i­dents said they are fed up and frus­trat­ed. “The Gov­ern­ment is not help­ing. The UNC is hand­i­capped so it is left to us. While we are not in favour of vi­o­lent con­fronta­tion, armed protest, we hope that the Gov­ern­ment will heed our re­quest and come and as­sist here be­cause it will be left to us, in our own hands,” said Ar­joon Teeluck, sec­re­tary of the Re­alise/Mandin­go Com­mu­ni­ty Coun­cil. The de­plorable road con­di­tion, which has led to high ve­hi­cle main­te­nance, has al­so caused the taxi fare to triple.

“Peo­ple can­not trav­el. Old peo­ple can­not go to the hos­pi­tal and the health cen­tres to get their med­ica­tion. They have to pay ex­or­bi­tant prices. In some cas­es, we have to hire a ve­hi­cle to take us to Lengua Health Cen­tre to get our drugs.” He said the am­bu­lance al­so takes longer to re­spond to an emer­gency in the area be­cause of the bad road.

"We have peo­ple dy­ing be­cause the am­bu­lance tak­ing time to ac­cess (the area), to leave come in and go out...” he claimed.

Since their pleas for help, writ­ten and ver­bal­ly, have fall­en on deaf ears, the res­i­dents said they are go­ing to try prayer. “We were plan­ning to do a poo­ja to­mor­row for Row­ley and Ro­han Sinanan. We were plan­ning to do a poo­ja for them to­mor­row to see if we could get some as­sis­tance.”

An­oth­er res­i­dent Tara­dath Bridge­mo­han who lost his home said over 200 res­i­dents are af­fect­ed. Not­ing that work was cur­rent­ly be­ing done along the near­by Lengua Road, he said the com­mu­ni­ty has been ne­glect­ed for over 40 years.

Not­ing that Sa­ha­dath Road leads to Moru­ga and Bar­rack­pore, he said Mandin­go Road has al­ready been closed due to a land­slip and if Sa­ha­dath Road clos­es res­i­dents may have to walk to Princes Town.

Lengua/In­di­an Walk Coun­cil­lor Ra­jesh Lal said the Princes Town Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion does not have the fund­ing to un­der­take the re­pairs to Sa­ha­dath Road. The cor­po­ra­tion’s tech­ni­cal team es­ti­mat­ed that it would cost rough­ly $2 mil­lion to re­pair the road, he said, but they do not have the fund­ing. He said over a year ago the cor­po­ra­tion re­quest­ed spe­cial fund­ing from the min­istry to do the project but re­ceived no re­sponse.

He said, "If the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment gives us the mon­ey we are will­ing, we are ca­pa­ble, we will get the job done.” Lall, how­ev­er, said he was able to get some cold mix to un­der­take re­pairs to an area along Sa­ha­dath Road.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment vua What­sApp, Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan did not re­spond.