SAMBA: Braving thick fog and extreme morning chill, Geeta Kumari and her husband walked to the polling booth in Samba district on Wednesday to cast their votes in the hope that the elected candidate would meet their long-standing demand of road connectivity to their small village in Jammu and Kashmir”s border area.Not just Kumari, most villagers in Sumb Dunai and nearby hamlets who have voted in the DDC polls expect the government, and lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha in particular, to ensure road connectivity in the border district of Samba at the earliest.”Today I voted in the DDC elections. Whichever candidate is elected in these polls from our constituency, we have one hope that he will ensure best road connectivity to our hamlet,” Kumari said.She said she has never seen metalled roads since she started living in this hamlet after getting married 12 years ago.”Our major problem is (lack of) metalled road connectivity. The connectivity is very bad, through stones and nallahs. Since the time I was married in this village 12 years ago, there has been no work done by the government to build metalled road connectivity,” she said.According to the villagers, money was allocated for the construction of the road during the BJP”s rule and some work to build roads started a few years ago, but it was later abandoned.Usha Devi, another resident of the small village, said mini buses undertake journeys to ferry villagers through the muddy and stone-laid road through nallahs, which takes between one and a half and two hours to reach the nearby villages instead of just 45 minutes if there were better roads.”The transporters refuse to send more vehicles to ferry passengers in view of the bad road conditions resulting in overloading which causes problems to us, particularly girls and boys going for studies in towns,” she said.Rajinder Kumar of Patyari village said once better road connectivity is put in place it will be the biggest development to several unconnected villages in Sumb block.The villagers said they feel development of the village can only take place once there is metalled road connectivity to their hamlets.They said that despite the “much hyped” village development programmes, better road connectivity is still a dream for them.The District Development Council (DDC) elections, the first major political activity in Jammu and Kashmir since the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5 last year, are being held in eight phases from November 28 to December 22.
