Sopore village residents demand better amenities

Sopore, Nov 12: The residents of Eidipora Bomai area of Sopore in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district have sought better basic amenities in their village and demanded the attention of higher-ups.

Locals of the area said that there is a shortage of drinking water, poor healthcare facilities, power crisis, and dilapidated roads in the area.

“The area has been overlooked by successive governments and nobody seems to be taking our issues seriously,” they said.

Muhammad Afzal, a local, said that they cast votes in the District Development Council (DDC) election just to see the signs of development in their area but “nothing has happened till now on the ground”.

“We have been victimised and fooled by successive regimes, who only visited us to seek votes,” he said.

“Despite being the largest village in the entire Zaingeer belt, the Public Health Centre (PHC) in the area sans facilities and there is a shortage of doctors,” residents said. They said that the X-ray machine installed in the hospital a year ago is also now lying defunct and no official from the hospital is bothered to repair the machine.

“How long will we suffer in the absence of basic necessities in our village? Why is our village ignored, despite having other nearby areas developmentally rich,” a group of locals said.

They said that they had repeatedly brought these issues to the notice of the higher ups of the administration several times but on ground nothing had been done. The residents also alleged that least attention was given towards their village compared to other nearby villages and the administration was not bothered about the worst condition of the village.

The civil society members of the area said that Eidipora Bomai village is based on around thousand households but the government has totally neglected the area with respect to public amenities.

They said that on the one hand, the government claims that it is working for the benefit of people residing in remote areas and “if we talk about the present condition of the area no development work has been carried out in our village”. The residents appealed to the Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha and district administration Baramulla to resolve their problems at the earliest.