Vijayawada has had the honour of coming out as the cleanest big city in Swachh Survekshan 2018. It also beat Visakhapatnam, the largest city and former cleanest city in AP, and bagged the fifth place in the top 100 clean cities of the country. The civic body was on cloud nine as its year-long efforts had yielded the best of the results and citizens were filled with pride. But all this sense of pride and honour could be wiped off by a single spell of rain. As roads get inundated even after a brief spell, drainage overflow brings back all the miseries of monsoon.
Thanks to the poor drainage system, the city couldn’t get rid of plastic waste and silt for decades. The only solution to the unending suffering of citizens every monsoon is a proper storm water drainage system capable of absorbing and letting any amount of rainwater out of the city limits. The ongoing construction of the drain could do the same but not any day soon as only 30% of progress has been achieved so far.
The partly done work in many colonies has only added to the woes of the people and the civic body that is supposed to be prepared to tackle the problem of water-logging and overflow of sewage has hit a roadblock as the construction work blocked even the normal flow of drains.
The Corporation has in the post-monsoon season made necessary changes to the culverts and engaged earthmovers to remove plastic waste and silt. In many areas, the intensity of the problem came down comparatively but did not go forever.
Only the duration of water-logging has been reduced like in the case of the Mother Teresa junction where it takes several hours for the water to recede earlier and just about an hour at present.
Efforts are being made by the civic body to avoid inundation. Following the orders of civic chief J. Nivas, the engineering officials made an arrangement on Eluru Road to avoid water-logging by interconnecting the side drains so that water recedes through one side of the drain even if the other gets blocked.
