Over the last 25-odd years, residents of Sainik Farms have toiled hard to transform the colony into an oasis where quiet and peace prevails amid the city’s cacophany.
Make no mistake, we love Sainik Farms – its environment, the trees and the birds, the round-the-clock power supply, the slightly less polluted air and the helpful neighbours, the neat rows of painted bungalows standing in numbered lanes.
For those who are new to the colony, however, it would be hard to visualize how the situation used to be thirty years ago. For one, there was virtually no electricity so everyone used community generators run by private individuals who charged everyone a bomb, if not indeed pulling electricity from street light cables. The latter would have the police penalize them and confiscate the connecting wires or lined their pockets by looking the other way.
The roads, one is told, were as good as non-existent and those that did exist were more of pot holes joined together, as they say. If it rained, you swam or waded to your destination while your cars stalled and virtually drowned.
Of course there was no proper signage or numbering. It was all a maze not only for the outsiders but often also for the residents.
The large empty plots were infested with howling jackals and huge rats who often visited nearby homes to frighten the weak hearted.
But there was a bonhomie amongst the ‘settlers’. They helped each other with grocery shopping, car pools for children et cetera.
Then the Residents Welfare Associations (RWAs) got into action. The roads were paved, lanes were numbered, streetlights came up, the BSES brought light to homes, and schools and even a dispensary were set up.
Today, one looks around and there’s an elite club, shiny beauty parlours, convenience stores and community tubewells supplying potable water to residents’ homes.
There are any number of BMWs and Mercede Benz cars on the narrow streets jostling with scooterists and three-wheelers. The lanes are lined by huge homes. There are hour-long traffic jams and plots are piled up with stinking garbage. We have been rated an “affluent” colony, sans a sewage system or wide-enough roads or a traffic management system or even basic ownership rights.
The jackals and rats have given way to monkeys, snakes and termites that threaten our families and our houses.
The RWAs are trying their best but each one of us needs to lend a hand and ‘give a little’ to create better living conditions for ourselves, our children, grandchildren and senior citizens. As they say, we have miles to go before we rest.
