Pavements are not the only public spaces encroached on in Calcutta. The banks of the city’s canals are in a similar state.

After a meeting on Monday to take stock of the condition of the canals running through the city, mayor Firhad Hakim admitted that the banks along most of them are encroached on. This, he said, creates hurdles for dredging.

The admission, coming after the arrival of the monsoon, does not augur well for the city. Despite knowing that canal banks have been encroached on, the authorities have done very little to address the problem.

The state irrigation department dredges canals at regular intervals. It has over the past year dredged many canals crisscrossing the city.

Officials said the department has not been able to dredge long stretches of important canals because of informal settlements, warehouses and other structures on the banks.

“The silt picked up during dredging has to be carried 3-4km by boat before it can be dumped on the banks. This is making dredging difficult,” Hakim said after the meeting.

“Many canal banks have been encroached on. The banks along the Beleghata, Begor and Suti canals are among them,” Hakim said when reporters asked for the names of the some of the canals facing the problem.

A senior engineer of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said the Beleghata canal has two slopes, one towards the river Hooghly and the other towards Salt Lake. It runs along Chaulpatty Road from Chingrighata and drains out water from Beleghata, Sealdah and other parts of central Calcutta.

The Begor canal runs through Behala and its command zone includes large parts of Behala. The Suti canal starts from Sonarpur and runs through Mukundapur and Nayabad in southeast Calcutta, said the engineer.

An official in the irrigation department told Metro that canal banks across the city have been occupied by encroachers but they are still going ahead with the dredging.

“In the Beleghata canal, we have started dredging on the stretches that are free of encroachments,” he said. “The canal banks slope towards the water. Even the slopes have been encroached on in some places.”

The civic authorities had discussed the problem of encroachments on canal banks earlier, too, but not much was done to remove the structures.

At a KMC meeting in September last year, officials and engineers had pointed out that the desilting of the 7.4km-long Beleghata canal could not be carried out till the banks were cleared of encroachments.

One of the issues flagged at Monday’s meeting was the problem faced in dredging the points where canals are intersecting.

“There are some points where two canals are intersecting. Ideally, the bed of one of the canals should be above the bed of the other. That facilitates the flow from one canal to another. But at some intersections, the beds of both canals are at the same height. That is creating problems in the flow of water,” said Tarak Singh, mayoral council member, drainage, KMC.

The irrigation department official said he would not comment on the issue as it needs a broader discussion.