No pucca road, village in assembly speaker’s seat to boycott polls

AURANGABAD: Entry only after building a pucca road to the village.

That’s the stern warning the 2,000-odd residents of Kavitkheda village, a modest village about 35 km from here, have given to all candidates keen on contesting the Lok Sabha election from Jalna.

The village on the Mumbai–Kolkata national highway is in the assembly constituency of assembly speaker Haribhau Bagde. They have put up a banner on the highway, declaring that they are boycotting the polls as the road to their village has never been properly built.

The villagers have also warned that candidates will not be allowed to hold public meetings or address the villagers unless the road work is done. “We are not going to let politicians enter our village even for canvasing and are going to move HC against these politicians,” said Nikita Somde, a graduation student.

For the past several decades, residents here have been requesting that the 5-km long stretch connecting their village to the highway and the nearest large village be made a tar road. Their plea has, however, fallen on deaf ears. The 500-odd electors in the village want to make their vote count.

In the run-up to the 2014 general and assembly elections, candidates from across the parties had promised them that the road would be constructed. After winning elections though, nothing changed on the ground.

Former sarpanch Bhausaheb Kolte said, “In the past, the bhoomipujan for the road construction has been done four times but the work never started. Even the assembly speaker, while contesting the elections, had promised to get the road built soon.”

Residents of Kavitkheda depend on the neighbouring Vadodbazar, a comparatively bigger village, for government health facilities, weekly market and even Zilla Parishad school. The walk from Kavitkheda to Vadodbazar, a distance of 3.5 km, takes over one and half hour. The kuccha road makes a two-wheeler ride between the two villages a bumpy 20-25 minute ride.

The villagers said that the situation worsens in the monsoon season. Hardly any student from the village goes to school. Even now, the school ends at 5pm but the students make their way home only by 6.30pm.

When contacted, Bagde said that the villagers had not him in person with the request for building the road in the past one year. “The other day I saw the board about villagers announcing their boycott of elections. The problem is that the road they are demanding falls under the jurisdiction of Zilla Parishad and we do not have a ZP member from the area, because of which we could not construct the road,” he said.

The assembly speaker said that as the model code of conduct for the Lok Sabha elections has come into force, he will not be able to do much. He, however, assured that the road is constructed before the assembly elections later this year.