A nightmare called OMR stretch

CHENNAI: Plans may be in the pipeline to extend Chennai’s poster child IT Highway along OMR beyond its current end at Siruseri. But urgent repair work is the immediate need of the hour on the stretch between Siruseri and Mahabalipuram, according to regular users of the stretch. The stretch, which had not been in a pathetic condition as it is, has taken a serious beating with the recent rains. And if cratered roads were not bad enough, a drive down the stretch is usually a pretty stop-and-go affair, thanks to the liberal smattering of cows that roam the road freely.The stretch of road near Padur now resembles a road under construction, where vehicles have to constantly take detours to the other side of the median to proceed to their destinations. While that may not be the official norm on OMR, motorists have taken to generally following the MTC buses that ply liberally on the wrong side of the road to avoid the craters on the correct side.“It is not that I am not willing to ride my bike on the correct side of the road. In fact, I usually do. But when I am riding down and I see a bus on the wrong side, I think there can be no harm in a few two-wheelers, autos or cars following the bus. The traffic is going to get jammed on the other side anyway,” grins Abishek (name changed), a student of the nearby Hindustan University.“Why are you asking us this? You go and ask the bus drivers first why they go on the wrong side. We only follow them,” insist drivers at a share auto stand near Siruseri. It would probably take a least thrice the amount of time for vehicles to cross those bad stretches of road if they were to stay on the correct side of the road, they observed.Residents of Padur, the first major town on OMR after the end of the IT Highway, say the road used to be good till a few years back. “They expanded the road and laid it beautifully around 10 years ago. But once they started building the IT Highway, this stretch has been neglected. I don’t recall it being laid or repaired in the last four or five years,” says Venkatraman, who has run a grocery store on the stretch for over 15 years.“Whether they extend the IT Highway or not, it doesn’t matter much to me. But they cannot ignore the fact that it needs to be repaired immediately,” he adds.