The place next to the public toilet and behind the Coimbatore Corporation’s water tank in Varadharajapuram has turned a haven for sullage lorry owners to discharge euents in the open, into the canal. | Photo Credit: M. Periasamy more-in Behind the Coimbatore Corporation’s water tank in Varadharajapuram and right next to the dilapidated public toilet is an enclosure that is long and wide enough to accommodate a lorry. There, almost every night and early morning, before sunrise, lorry drivers park their vehicles and discharge sewage with human waste into the nearby channel, in the open. To make it convenient for them to do so, the drivers have damaged the street light near the toilet. They have also removed the board the Coimbatore Corporation had set up warning them of such illegal discharge, says P. Kumar of the nearby Thilagar Street 1. The Corporation had placed the board around six months ago after the area residents lodged a complaint with the district administration. The drivers removed the board within three days of the Corporation erecting it. When the drivers let out the sewage, the odour is so unbearable that the residents shut their windows and doors, rues Thirunagar Kudi-irupor Nala Sangam’s (residents’ welfare association) president A. Kannadurai. The locality is a few furlongs south of the discharge point and right next to the channel that carries the discharged waste. If the drivers let out the waste around lunch time, residents like him simply give up eating and they like throwing up, complains resident K.S. Dhandapani. During rains, it is worse as a few houses on the banks of the channel get inundated with the faeces-carrying sewage, adds resident S. Rathinam. The drivers letting out sewage almost on a daily basis has made it difficult for the area residents and also those in the nearby Singanallur Housing Unit to use the road to reach Varadharajapuram. They too have complained to the Coimbatore Corporation but there has not been any relief. Officials in the Corporation say that they did try to address the residents’ grievance by taking various measures - asking the local residents to keep a vigil on sewage lorries to alert them, erecting notice boards and repairing the street light there to dissuade the drivers from discharging sewage - but nothing worked. They add that they would make a renewed attempt to stop the menace and initiate stringent action on the errant drivers.

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