HYDERABAD: As the city’s ugly underbelly gets exposed with incessant rainfall, another example of gross negligence of allowing a key storm water drain to get encroached upon indiscriminately has come to the surface. For those wondering why the main Punjagutta-Khairatabad road gets submerged whenever there is a good rain and the road opposite Jalagam Vengal Rao Park caves in often, the answer is simple — because repair of the Punjagutta storm water drain underneath is incomplete.
Six years ago, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) decided to repair the drain to an extent of 4.10 km connecting the Banjara surplus lake (or Jalagam Vengal Rao Park) to the Hussainsagar lake through the Model House crossing the Punjagutta main road at an estimated cost of Rs. 23 crore. Work was to be completed in six months.
However, with the assigned contractor not taking it up, the work order was cancelled and tenders were called again dividing it into four packages wherever ‘free stretches’ were available. It was decided to take up box design rather than open to the sky and revamp it to improve the flow through gravity to prevent inundations of habitations en route and on the highway. Work on all the four stretches was to have been completed in 23 months by September 2014. Save for a few small bits of 30 metres each, the project got stymied. Initially, the delay was because of repairs to be done to Water Board’s existing sewer lines, later there was opposition from the local people as many had built on the drain.
Dense telecommunication cables underneath and lack of clearances from the traffic police to divert vehicles or block the road because of the area being a hospital zone and commercial activity were other reasons for the work remaining incomplete, according to information obtained through the RTI Act by Kalyan J. Yakaiah of Hyderabad Intellectuals Forum, a voluntary body.
“There are no slums on this drain unlike others. We have noticed that the drain flow was affected because of buildings constructed by the well-to-do. Some of the properties belong to top officers and a hotel too was brazenly built on it,” confessed senior municipal officials, when contacted, pleading anonymity.
