The city’s residents can breathe easy as the Corporation has initiated steps to ensure that contractors digging road for laying storm water drain shall complete the work in time. The deadline the civic body has fixed for the contractors – July 31.
“The civic body wants them to complete the work before the onset of monsoon,” says Commissioner G. Latha. She conducted a meeting with officials on Friday to review the progress of storm water drain work.
Culverts
The Corporation has asked the contractors to prioritise work in such a way that they first completed culverts and road junctions.
The Corporation has estimated that the three contractors need to complete more than 100 culverts.
The other work that the Corporation has asked the contractors to prioritise is completing work at the disposal points.
“The objective here is to ensure that the drains carry water to the natural drains and do not block the flow of rain water,” Ms. Latha says.
As per the detailed project report, there are 12 disposal points and all of them are natural drains that flow across the city. Contractors have completed work at six of the 12 disposal points.
Executive Engineer P. Ganeshwaran, who attended the Friday’s meeting, says that the Corporation has fixed month-wise targets for two of the three contractors, who are executing six of the seven packages of the storm water drain project.
A contractor, SCW Companies, has completed its work. The Corporation assigned the company one of the seven packages – Package V – to take up work in Ganapathy by laying 84 km drain and constructing 340 culverts.
Mr. Ganeshwaran says that the company has completed the work in the recent past.
As for the remaining two contractors, the Corporation has said that once the deadline is over, it will levy a fine of Rs. 50,000 a day.
Ms. Latha says that the Corporation has asked the storm water drain contractors and also those executing the underground drainage work to repair the roads at the earliest and not leave them as undulating terrain after the execution of the work.
Funding
The Coimbatore Corporation is executing the storm water drain at Rs. 180 crore with partial funding from the Central Government under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission scheme.
