MCH exercise still incomplete

By T. Lalith Singh

HYDERABAD, FEB. 17. It's definitely not an address that one would wish to flaunt. Imagine the travails of having to remember a number as baffling as 8-2-293/82/PP/3 or trying to locate a place with such a number in the bustling metropolis.

With the massive exercise of the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) towards rationalising the house numbering in

the twin cities going into a deep coma, a convenient and `simple on tongue' address continues to elude residents of Hyderabad. Surprising is the fact that the MCH, which had completed the work of rationalising the house numbers three years ago, is yet to put the new system into implementation.

According to MCH officials, the new house numbering system, which has used the locality name and assigned numbers to streets and individual premises for easy identification, has to be notified in the Gazette before it could be put into use. Nobody, however, would explain why the same has not been done despite a lapse of three years.

The present three-tier house numbers in use for the last 50 years has the numbers for ward, block and the individual premise in series. For this purpose, the twin cities were divided into 35 wards and 236 blocks and with additions to the house numbers in the form of sub-numbers, bye-numbers and sub-bye-numbers, the whole configuration had turned chaotic over the years.

`Apart from causing great inconvenience to the public, this erratic and rather confusing numbering is also posing problems for several user departments such as Telecom, Transco, police and Property Tax Department," admits an official. The effort towards enumerating the properties on scientific lines was taken up in right earnest in 1993, but the same did not happen in the implementation, he rues.

The MCH teams which fanned out in the twin cities gave numbers to some 2,137 streets and 2,18,542 premises. The exercise which went on till 1997 had also delineated the twin cities into 250 localities and around 95 main streets that act as basic references.

The sign boards denoting the numbers and identifying the avenues were also put up at every street corner incurring a huge expenditure. With no purpose to serve, these sign-boards have turned perfect spots for pasting posters, pamphlets and other publicity material.

While admitting that the project has almost been forgotten for the last three years, MCH officials now claim to be working towards `correlating the old and new numbers.' It would take at least an year for giving a notification and perhaps another year for the user departments to incorporate and use the new numbers, they said.

According to an official, a partial revision of the new numbers is being planned as several new houses and colonies have come into existence since the numbers were decided around 1996-97. `All these premises have to be identified and given new numbers. Then only can it be notified,' he said.

`There are a few loose ends in what has been done so far. To address these problems, we are working on an action plan,' said the MCH Additional Commissioner, Mr. P. Randhir Reddy. Meetings with the user departments were planned and efforts would be made to evolve joint teams with representatives of these departments for the implementation of new, simple and scientific house numbering, he added.

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