Special effects: Yellow exercise on a ‘dummy’ SWD cover

As in other roads across Chennai, an effort to paint the SWD covers yellow is on display but some are repaired without even fixing or mending them.

“Yellow” has reached Tank Bund Road in Nungambakkam too. As in other roads across Chennai, an effort to paint the SWD covers yellow is on display at this road.

In one spot, the effort shows up in a weird shape and format. On the pavement along the carriageway towards Loyola College, an SWD manhole lacked a proper cover, and was managing with planks of wood laid over it. It still does not have a regular cover, only something simulating it. A stone slab has been placed over the manhole. And this slab bears the painted design of a regular circular SWD cover. The yellow is encircled by a black ring, imitating the model followed everywhere else. Only that, in other places, the yellow-and-black painting combo is carried out on real, functional and neatly fitting SWD covers. If the slab shifts, pedestrians would be exposed to risk of injury.

While the painting exercise was being carried out, why was no effort taken to source and fit a regular SWD cover through masonry work?The pavement on Tank Bund Road verges on the incorrigible. Dangerous gaps between huge four-sided drain slabs gawk at pedestrians. Thick and wide, the quadrilateral slabs have metal hooks for them to be lifted. A majority of the hooks have been beaten down; a few are upstanding, threatening to trip pedestrians. On this road, there are regular SWD manhole covers, the round ones: some of them are sunken. Now, they are sunken and yellow.