Daijiworld Media Network - Kundapur (SP)

Kundapur, Jul 8: The ore-laden trucks which have been damaging the roads and bridges, creating traffic snarls, giving rise to sanitation problems at some places and taking away the lives of people with impunity because of their excessive loads and reckless driving, again hogged the limelight in the taluk on Tuesday July 7.

After an ore truck hit a rickshaw, taking away lives of four people including a small child, apart from injuring a woman critically, besides turning the rickshaw into a mound of mangled metal, people resorted to spot agitation at Kambadakone near the accident spot. They blocked traffic on highway 17 for over 90 minutes. They sighted that the ore truck that caused the accident on Tuesday was being driven by the truck cleaner and that these trucks which pound the roads in the district in hundreds every day, are causing deaths and injuries to people in a routine manner.  They set up a pandal by the side of the highway and demanded that the movement of the ore trucks be banned forthwith.

During the agitation, the glasses of over ten trucks were destroyed and their tyres were deflated. The protestors struck to their stand that the deputy commissioner of the district has to come on the spot and address the problem.

Kundapur sub-divisional officer K N Ramesh came on the scene and pacified the agitators. He assured that some concrete measures would be taken to address the problems created by the ore trucks within the legal framework in a week’s time, after convening a meeting of officials in the presence of the district deputy commissioner.

Byndoor MLA K Lakshminarayan, zilla panchayat former president Raju Poojary, Kundapur tahsildar Ravi Kumar, deputy superintendent of police Shashidhar, circle inspector Kantaraj and others were present.

It may be recalled, that a family of four were going to Arehole Daivastana to get the small child they got recently blessed, before the child's father Keshav returned to Gokak along with family. Keshav ran a shop in Gokak and was to go back on Tuesday with his wife and child whom he had married about 18 months ago.