Daijiworld Media Network – Mangalore (MB)
with inputs from city correspondent (NR)
 
Mangalore, Jun 10: Leaders, ministers and babus keep travelling at the cost of the public exchequer in luxury cars, flights and live in comforts with amenities like free power, phone, water and the like.

It took the recent by-election at Ullal for many netas to come down from their ivory towers and get a first-hand experience of seeing how common people live in conditions of bad roads, faulty and erratic power supply, irregular or no water supply and many other problems.

None of them, however, expressed anything in public except promising the voters the moon - adopting Ullal, changing face of the town in three months and the like.

At least district minister-in-charge Bailumeginamane Nagaraj Shetty has had the grace of expressing in public that the Ullal by-election was an eye-opener, said a few citizens to Daijiworld correspondent.

It appears the 'padayatra'  undertaken by Nagaraj Shetty in Madani Nagar, Madhav Nagar, Jeppu and Valencia, which are in Ullal constituency, revealed a major cause of  people's woes such as  defunct borewells, offering no respite to residents of these localities.

He found faulty drainage systems with water overflowing on the roads at many places. Shetty directed  the department concerned to survey old borewells in the district and put them back in functional condition before Sepember. He warned that action would be taken against those officials under whose supervision, culverts had been blocked and water overflowed on roads.

• Click here  to view extensive coverage of Ullal by-election