A for Attingal and B for Block

Attingal town is gradually turning into one of the narrowest bottlenecks on the Thiruvananthapuram-Kollam part of NH 47. The never-ceasing traffic reforms and the countless accidents have made the whole traffic system appear like an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle. You can do different permutations and combinations. But at the end, every arrangement meets a stumbling block: Poovanpara bridge on Vamanapuram River. The plan for construction of a by-pass road is perhaps as old as the current Municipal Chairman, Mr. C.J. Rajesh Kumar (who is only 30+, a rather young age for a municipal chairman).

But if the bypass is constructed according to that decades old plan, the new road will be embarrassingly inadequate for solving the traffic problems of the town. The plan does not propose to build a bridge over Vamanapuram River, according to reliable sources. Any bypass road that does not have a parallel bridge on the river will not help in reducing the traffic congestion. It should be now acknowledged that the long delay in construction is actually a blessing in disguise. Also, there have been reports about another plan for a bypass that starts from Kaduvayil Palli and links with highway at Korani. It does seem to have a plan to construct a bridge. At the present circumstances, the latter sounds better. If both have powerful backers, since it looks like so, then let us better scrap both the plans and think about a new plan. The most important aspect is implementing the plan as soon as possible. Otherwise, kindergarten students in Attingal will learn the alphabets through a new kind of rhyme: A for Attingal and B for block, traffic block that is.