Road gullies from sectors 1 to 30 have a capacity of up to 15 mm, while road gullies in sectors 30 to 35 can handle up to 20 mm. Those in the Southern sectors can handle only up to 25 mm rain. (Representational Image) THE UT civic body has yet again spent over Rs 1.25 crore for merely cleaning road gullies in view of preparing for the upcoming monsoon season.
The MC chief engineer, Shailender Singh, claimed that 85 per cent of all road gullies have been cleaned by now.
The city has around 33,000 road gullies, of which around 26,000 have been cleaned, claimed Singh.
When asked about where the amount was spent, Singh said, “We hire 70 additional people for cleaning of road gullies. The amount was spent in their salaries. Throughout the year, we have only 70 people, but for the monsoon period, we hire 70 more. In a way there are 140 people working to clean the road gullies.”
However, residents say that spending large amounts of money on cleaning gullies is a waste as sweepers dump garbage collected from the streets back in the gullies.
Reasons for waterlogging in the city
To address the problem of waterlogging, the MC spends close to a whopping Rs 1 crore on cleaning road gullies every year. Despite that the problem continues to persist.
“Our road gullies are designed only for certain amount of rain. If there is rainfall beyond that capacity, there is water logging; but it subsequently gets drained out,” Shailender Singh told The Indian Express.
Road gullies from sectors 1 to 30 have a capacity of up to 15 mm, while road gullies in sectors 30 to 35 can handle up to 20 mm. Those in the Southern sectors can handle only up to 25 mm rain.
“Chandigarh’s slope is from North to South and moreover, the gullies are designed in a way that they cannot accommodate heavy intensity rain. There will be water logging for some minutes or hours,” said Singh.
On being asked about why the capacity of these gullies cannot be increased, Singh said the move will incur a huge expenditure and hence is not feasible. “It is going to be too costly if we increase the capacity to accommodating up to 50 mm or 100 mm of rain. Rains happen only sometimes but upgradation of the entire infrastructure will be highly expensive,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Municipal Corporation said that the UT Administration has also almost completed cleaning of N-choe and Sukhna choe.
The amount of money spent on cleaning gullies has been questioned in several House meetings earlier too, where members stated that the work could have been done for much lesser money.
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