The Calcutta Municipal Corporation has asked the state irrigation department to urgently desilt a canal stretch near the Chowbaga drainage pumping station that drains out rainwater from places like Mukundapur, Kasba and Jadavpur. These were some of the most flooded pockets of the city this monsoon.
Silt deposits and lack of work on the canals have handicapped the city’s drainage.
A senior engineer of the CMC said that they were “unable to operate pumps to optimum capacity as enough water does not flow into the drainage pumping station to run all the pumps”. Layers of silt have reduced the bed of the canal and its capacity to hold water.
If the canal takes longer to clear, waterlogging on the road also takes longer to recede.
The request was made to the irrigation department’s representative at a coordination meeting between various agencies at the CMC headquarters on Friday.
“We have requested the irrigation department to desilt a stretch of the Tollygunge-Panchannagram (TP) canal close to the Chowbaga drainage pumping station. Rainwater from Kasba, Jadavpur, Mukundapur, New Garia flows into the TP canal through smaller canals. This water is carried to the drainage pumping station,” said a senior engineer of the CMC’s drainage department.
The desilting is necessary to avoid waterlogging on the scale that was witnessed several times this monsoon.
CMC engineers clarified that desilting a small stretch near the drainage pumping station will not match the efficiency of desilting all canals that bring water to the station. But it would at least allow all pumps to function in case of heavy rain during Puja.
The drainage pumping stations use pumps to suck out the water in the canal faster and dump it into another that finally takes the rainwater out of the city and to rivers like Bidyadhari and Kulti, which are situated to the east of Calcutta.