The Story of a Speed Breaker

The place where we run our Hyderabad House restaurant in KPHB, is a service lane which is 10 meters away from the main road that is the Bombay Highway. It has good visibility excepting some trees that partly obstruct the sight and these have been grown by the Municipal Corporation as a part of the green zone drive.

The service lane is a small cul-de-sac which ends with just a couple of houses after our building and towards the other side there is only one building adjacent to ours. A bar cum restaurant is being carried out in that building. A small flashback episode is that, before we took the building on lease, the bar owner has asked our landlord to rent the premises to run another bar cum restaurant, for which the owner apparently didn't agree. Quite predictably the bar owner is not happy about it and has started looking out ways to trouble our owner.

A servant maid cleans the front portion of our building on a daily basis using water, which flows on to the road and then drifts towards the road in front of the bar. Although, the bar owner never brought this to our attention as an issue, I remember only one instance where he referred to this.

Finally one fine morning around 15 days ago, the bar owner got a barrier/ speed breaker built on the road to avoid water from flowing towards the road facing their building. The water got stagnated in front of our restaurant and formed a puddle making it very inconvenient to our customers to get into the restaurant. Our landlord promptly removed it the next day morning. Couple of days later, once again a similar barrier was built by the bar people which was duly destroyed by our land lord. This time the bar people built a proper speed breaker using cement mortar. This time our owner couldn’t remove it and hence the barrier remained causing inconvenience to the customers and passers by. It was brought to our notice and I duly asked our restaurant manager to report it to the Municipal authorities in KPHB.

Ranjith, the manager of the restaurant went to the municipal authorities and made a verbal complaint, he was told that people would be sent to remove the same. Nothing has happened until the next day. Once again Ranjith went to the municipal office and reminded them, he was scolded and told that he doesn't have to remind them so often and it would be taken care of. However nothing has happened.

When the restaurant was started, a sanitary inspector has come to our place had a sumptuous dinner, took five thousand as bribe and issued us with a certificate about the hygiene conditions in the restaurant. The issue of the speed breaker was brought to his notice; he assured that it would be taken care of. Finally, he came down, saw the speed breaker and told us that it doesn't fall under his preview and has given us the number of another person in the municipality.

We have duly contacted him only to be told that, he cannot come and attend these kinds of small things and advised us to remove it our self.

I am neither surprised nor furious about the apathy of the municipal authorities, at the same time I will not let this happen to us, by remaining silent. I have decided that, I am not going to pay them a single rupee bribe to have this speed breaker removed. I would like to pursue it until the end, following their protocol and would like to see how many more turns it would take and how many more people we would be referred to. Of the entire series of incidents, the funniest thing was nobody in the municipal office knows who is responsible for removing such unauthorized speed breakers. Strangely I don't feel annoyed that I am not getting the service for the municipal taxes that I pay or develop and express anguish that in India things would happen only like this. I am going to act on it. Looks like we have interesting things ahead.