A proposal to reconstruct houses in Bowbazar that were damaged while boring the underground tunnel for East-West metro in 2019 will be placed before the mayoral council of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation on Friday, mayor Firhad Hakim said.

A senior official of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said 23 buildings will be reconstructed following their old design.

Hakim later told Metro that most of these plots were so small that there would be hardly any space to construct a building if they had to leave the mandatory open space under the existing building rules. “These reconstructed buildings will not have to adhere to all the existing building rules. The proposal will be placed before the mayoral council on Friday,” he said.

The nod of the mayoral council, the highest decision-making body in the KMC, is required to bypass any existing rule as a special case.

“The proposal to reconstruct the houses will be placed before the mayoral council on September 27,” Hakim said at the civic house during the monthly councillors’ meeting on Wednesday.

The mayor was responding to a question from Biswarup Dey, the councillor of Ward 48 which covers the part of Bowbazar where the houses were damaged.

“People who lost their homes have been staying elsewhere for so many years. The chief minister had herself said that these people should be get back their homes at the earliest,” Dey later told this newspaper.

Dey added that more than 100 families live in these 23 buildings on Durga Pithuri Lane and Syakrapara Lane.

The 23 houses that will be rebuilt were damaged in 2019, he said. “The buildings have been pulled down,” he said.

A 2.45km stretch of the 32-km East-West Metro in Bowbazar has seen four accidents so far. Cracks appeared in houses for the first time in September 2019 after a tunnel-boring machine hit an aquifer. There were three subsequent reruns — in May and October 2022, and again on September 6.

After the 2019 accident, the KMC appointed a team of three engineering professors from Jadavpur University to assess the condition of the damaged buildings. The report was submitted to KMC.

“Our mandate was to assess the conditions of the damaged buildings and determine the ones that were beyond any scope of repair and ones that could be repaired. We have submitted our report before the pandemic,” said Himadri Guha, one of the members of the three-member committee and a visiting faculty at Jadavpur University.

The Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation (KMRC), the agency executing the East-West metro project, will build the houses once the plan is approved. KMRC has already picked a company to rebuild the houses.

The construction of the new homes was supposed to have started in April 2024. The KMRC had said it wanted to hand over the keys to the new homes by March 2026. But construction has yet to begin.

On September 6, an underground water leakage triggered by the East-West Metro construction forced the evacuation of more than 50 residents from six homes.

The senior KMC official said the KMRC submitted sketches of building plans. “The plans look fine. But we need to have the nod of the mayoral council as the proposed buildings will not adhere to the existing building rules,” said the official.

“These were buildings first constructed decades ago when the building rules were not so strict. The buildings had to be pulled down because of the accident. The residents and the owners are not to blame for what happened. We cannot ask them to build as per existing building rules,” explained the official.