Tamil Nadu: Villagers furious as panchayat school turns tipplers' haven

CHENNAI: The residents of Kiliya Nagar , a tiny village near Melmaruvathur , are up in arms. They are angry that their repeated complaints of the panchayat middle school there being turned into a ‘bar’ by some men have been ignored by police and district education department.

On Thursday, a few villagers lodged a formal complaint with police, one of many, demanding action against the culprits.

Earlier, they had submitted videos and photographs of the suspects consuming liquor in their ‘own bar’ in complaints but say no action was taken.

“We are now waiting,” a resident named M Suresh told this reporter, “for a police officer like Vijay Kumar [actor Vijay’s character in the 2016-release ‘Theri’] to teach the drunks in our village a lesson.” The way Vijayakumar teaches a group of drunks nursery rhyme ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, posing questions from a Class II textbook is a novel way of taming them and could work here, he said.

While police claim the suspects are from the same village comprising about 200 households and a population of less than 1,000, the residents say none from the hamlet would be fool enough to commit the offence.

Each morning, Suresh said, Maragatham, a conservancy worker from the same village, routinely swept away empty liquor bottles from the premises, while many students complained of getting their bare feet cut by shards of broken glass. The school, with 50 students in eight classrooms, five teachers including noon-meal official and a physical education teacher, is perched on the border of Kancheepuram and the adjacent Tiruvannamalai districts, he said.

Another resident complained that Kiliya Nagar, once infamous for brewing arrack , was now home to an 85-year-old woman named Kullammal and her family members who sold illicit liquor smuggled in from Puducherry. “Police know about the woman and her family members. They routinely apprehend her, but get her releases soon after producing her before a magistrate’s court citing her age and some illness,” he added.

With a local body council yet to be elected, Ayyappan, the head clerk in the panchayat office, is the only ‘official’. “We have informed the district education department. The school has a compound wall and a gate. We got a new lock, but the miscreants broke it and entered the school premises,” Ayyappan told TOI.