Dharmapuri: The demand to build a road has intensified after a young woman from Alakattu hill village in Dharmapuri district was carried on a ‘doli’ to be taken for treatment.
Alakattu hill village falls under Vattuvan Alli panchayat in Pennagaram union of Dharmapuri district. This hill village, home to more than 30 families, can be reached only by walking 7 kilometers on a dangerous mud road from the Seengadu area at the foothills in Palacode union. Some young people risk their lives and travel on this road on two-wheelers.
The people living here have to walk all the way to the foothills of Seengadu even for emergency medical treatment, including snakebite, and only then can they travel by vehicle to Palacode. In this situation, the incident of carrying an ailing woman on a stretcher to receive treatment has caused a stir. Mallika (25) is from Alakattu village. She is married and lives in Manjumalai village in the Anjetti taluk of Krishnagiri district.
Recently, Mallika, who had come to her parents’ house for the Gauri fasting ritual, developed severe stomach pain after midnight the day before yesterday. When an attempt was made to take her to the hospital on a two-wheeler, travel became impossible because the dirt roads had been washed away by the recent rains.
Therefore, villagers carried Mallika in a makeshift “doli” up to the foothills of Seengadu and from there took her by auto to the Palacode Government Hospital. She is currently receiving treatment there. In this situation, the demand to urgently lay roads to hill villages including Alakattu has now grown stronger.
Regarding this, some of the people living in the nearby hill villages said: Residents of the hill villages of Alakattu, Erimalai, and Kottur can first reach only Palacode town after coming to the Seengadu foothills in the Palacode union. Geographically, separating such villages and placing them under Vattuvan Alli panchayat in the Pennagaram union was a wrong move. Meanwhile, we have been living for generations by walking along a dangerous dirt road where wild animals such as elephants, gaurs, bears, and wild boars roam.
The essential demand to build roads to our villages has remained pending for a long time. The incident a few years ago, in which a girl bitten by a snake died in her parents’ presence while being carried on a makeshift stretcher on the way to treatment, still pains our hearts. Meanwhile, in 2018, the district administration made efforts to obtain forest department permission to build roads to our villages. However, when our area was declared the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary in 2020, that work suffered a severe setback.
In a democratic country, like everyone else, we too need to travel on safe roads in emergencies, and we do not know how many more lives we will have to pay as the price for it. There is not even the slightest justification for the government’s laws and rules being enforced so strictly when it comes to meeting the essential needs of mountain village residents, who are about 50 years behind in living standards. They said this.