Committees headed by the chairpersons of all 16 boroughs of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will have to monitor the water bodies across Kolkata and take action against any illegal attempt to fill them, civic officials said.
Each of the 16 committees has the KMC engineers in charge of the borough, an official from the land and land reforms department of the state government and the officers in charge of the local police stations, among others. The committees will meet every month.
The executive engineer of each borough has been tasked with taking action within 24 hours of receiving any complaint of encroachment or illegal filling of a water body. If the complaint is found to be true, the engineer will have to file an FIR.
A senior official of the KMC said the idea behind the decision to form committees at borough levels is to decentralise the mechanism to act against illegal filling of water bodies and involve public representatives in the action-taking process.
Earlier, all matters were referred to the KMC headquarters and that often led to delay in action.
An order announcing the formation of the committees, issued by the commissioner of the KMC last week, mentioned that it had the approval of the mayor of Kolkata.
“Councillors often complain that they do not get to know what action officials are taking if any complaint of illegal filling of water bodies is lodged. By making the borough chairpersons the head of the committees, we have included public representatives in the entire process,” said the official.
The decision to form the committees comes in the wake of the collapse of an allegedly illegal under-construction building in Garden Reach’s Azhar Molla Bagan, which left 12 people dead.
Residents of the area have alleged that the building came up after illegally filling a pond.
An investigation committee formed by the KMC to probe the reason for the collapse has found that at least a part of the plot on which the building was coming up is still a pond in government records.
A member of the probe committee has told The Telegraph that the structure was coming up on a 3-cottah plot. According to land records, it is split into four parts and one section of it, about 430sqft, is a pond.
Sources in the KMC said the civic body has to take action to ensure proper maintenance of a water body, even if it is privately owned, once it receives a complaint about its poor maintenance.
“We ask the owner to clean up the water body. If the owner fails to do so, we deploy people to clean it and recover the cost from the owner,” said the official.
“This is done because unclean and unused water bodies are also a threat to public health. They can turn into mosquito-breeding sites.”
The KMC has recently floated a tender asking cooperatives to use water bodies for pisciculture. This is done to ensure proper maintenance of water bodies and involve local people in their maintenance and also to let them earn some money.
But only about 30 water bodies, of the 144 for which the KMC is looking for bidders, have found takers.