Bhowanipore, Ballygunge focus of Kolkata Municipal Corporation pre-monsoon meeting

Kolkata: The Kolkata Municipal Corporation will work in tandem with state govt agencies to prevent waterlogging woes during monsoon. The civic team will also keep close contact with the several state govt agencies that include PWD, KMDA, irrigation department, Kolkata police and power utility agency CESC to thwart the dengue threat that strikes several parts of the city during the rainy season.

This was decided at a monsoon preparedness meeting at a community hall in Vivekananda Park. The meeting was convened to prepare a blueprint for mitigating waterlogging woes for large parts of south and south-west Kolkata that fall under the jurisdiction of four Assembly constituencies — namely Bhowanipore, Ballygunge, Rashbehari and Kolkata Port. During the meeting, which was attended by the KMC administrator Smita Pandey, former mayor Firhad Hakim, senior state govt and KMC officials decided to take guard against inundation in the neighbourhoods that are known as waterlogging-prone. Later, the KMC administrator said several issues relating to waterlogging and outbreak of dengue and malaria were discussed in the meeting with a view to giving citizens relief from such woes. Sources in the KMC said it was decided in the meeting that special vigil will need to be maintained on the Anwar Shah connector where residents in several neighbourhoods might face severe waterlogging due to non-completion of a drainage pumping station.

“We will need to keep all heavy-duty pumps at Ballygunge and Jodhpur Park drainage pumping stations ready to combat severe waterlogging in areas such as Ballygunge, Jodhpur Park, Lake Gardens, among other areas in the event of a downpour,” said a KMC official. The KMC sewerage and drainage department will also need to keep parts of Park Street, Camac Street, Elliot Road and Bhowanipore that fall under CM Suvendu Adhikari’s Bhowanipore Assembly constituency free from waterlogging. “We have devised a plan to prevent waterlogging in the low-lying areas of Camac Street, Park Street and several Bhowanipore neighbourhoods. We apprehend that non-completion of Northern Park drainage pumping station in Bhowanipore might aggregate the waterlogging scenario in some neighbourhoods,” said a civic official.

The KMC will form a team comprising officials from the civic body’s sewerage and drainage, health, buildings, solid waste management, civil engineering to take on the dengue challenge and offer the inmates of insecure buildings safety. “We will need to tie up with several civic departments and inspect whether garbage in the state housing complexes is getting accumulated. If we find such accumulation, which paves the way for outbreak of vector-borne diseases, we may need to rope in the state PWD and clean up the mess. We will form a team to check the vulnerability of the insecure building,” said an official of the KMC.