February at Sabari Terrace

Dear Friends

At the last meeting we decided that we will send out monthly mails abou the activities at Sabari Terrace. This will hopefully make the mails shorter - :)

However, when I asked Prakash to make a list of the activities of February 2013 I was surprised that every day there was some 'major' activity... there was never a 'regular day' at Sabari Terrace... when things 'just happened' 

Some of the important activities are...

• The process of cleaning the STP tanks (by Fujino) and the recommissioning of the STP plant with all the spirals was completed in the first week. Subsequently our staff has started adding Proklean and the water quality should be back to normal any day now. If you are still experiencing some bad odour pl. keep the technical staff informed so that they can take corrective measures. 
• We had a staff meeting where Ravi Alfred, Srinivas E, Meena Suresh and I met with them. We discussed all their concerns and are in the process of sorting out some of the issues. The main problem is the interaction with PG staff - especially Mr Mohan Behra's staff who are rude and uncooperative. Mr. Mohan has been informed several times to keep his staff in check but there has been no positive result. I would request the respective owners to pl. speak to him.
• To enable smooth garbage collection we have convinced the corporation to station one of their garbage bins inside our premises. This is in addition to the one we already have here - this will help us when there is a delay in garbage collection. We have also bought two new small metallic garbage bins to be kept at each block as the old plastic bins that we had have begun to give way. We propose to use the old bins to collect recyclable wastes - glass, plastic, paper.
• For a long time the police have been asking the association to have a list of all residents in the apartments - especially of the 'floating population' of PG tenants and SA guests  (along with their ID card copies and Cell phone numbers). While Le Papillion has been providing us with their guest list the PG flats have been largely ignoring this request. As pointed out at the last meeting we suspected that they are delaying this as they have been housing more that the 6 people that they committed to be housing in each flat. Our suspicion was right and as a result of the investigation that Binoy Kumar carried out over two weekends. This explains the excess amount of water that we have been buying... and the stress the other services too. The report has been given to the committee and the respective people will receive another mail in that respect. 
• Pest control service was carried out for rats and for cockroaches (second edition of our annual contract). We found over 10 dead rats and we believe the rat problem has been eradicated for now. Hopefully with no rats the snakes will also go elsewhere in search of their food. :)
• AMC for the A/C at the gym; 
• Purchase of snake catcher; 
• AMC Service for the gen-set; 
• Purchase of chemicals and consumable for the next quarter; 
• Bird proofing the overhead tanks; 
• Some repairs to lifts (thanks to the abuse by PG/SA guests) were carried out among other regular maintenance works.
• Security service has been a constant bug-bear. P K Anand Kumar has taken up the issue and has been speaking to the senior officers from Eagle Security - but it seems like they are not likely to improve their services despite repeated complaints and imposing penalties. Anand is exploring the possibility of changing the agency. We hope to take a final call on this very soon.
• We found that someone had been tampering with the window panes at some of the EB rooms to gain access. We believe this was to tamper with the meters/connections. To avoid a situation similar to last year when there was several cases of power theft detected by the TNEB Raid we have installedmetallic grills for all these windows.
• Lot of families have been using the terrace to dry their clothes... with a web of ropes traversing the entire area - We have just installed a decent set of clothes lines on the terrace of each block to enable efficient usage of space and we hope all the residents will make use of this. 
• It has been one year since the garden contract was awarded to a new agency and as is evident from the photos the place is looking green and beautiful. We have added some more plants (along the central lawn) and replaced some of the missing/damaged plants.
• Our first batch of compost is ready. This was produced entirely from our garden wastes... grass, leaves etc.  We have just added earthworms to the containers and hope to produce our second lot of compost in the next 60 days.  We have explained to all the kids the concept of vermi-composting  - you can ask them if you have any questions! :) We encourage all residents to please send your raw veggie wastes (not cooked food) to the compost bin. Pl. instruct your maids to interact with our housekeeping supervisor regarding the same. Very Important - Pl. ensure that plastic covers and other non-bio degradable materials are not thrown here. PL. also ensure that no cooked food is thrown into this bin. It will kill the earthworms and the entire effort will go waste.