Rain clogs all major Chandigarh roads

Chandigarh residents were a harried lot when heavy rain choked major city roads, bringing traffic to a grinding halt. Such was the situation that just to reach from Sector 22 to Sector 35, across the road, it took people as long as over one-and-a-half hours.

At Sector 35 roundabout, there was bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Clogged roads included areas of all main roundabouts, that is sectors 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 28 and other sectors.

In Sector 22, water even entered houses and most of the belongings of residents got spoilt. In Sector-25, all the roads and streets were filled with water. A local resident of the sector, Subhash, said that people had to face a lot of trouble due to stagnation of water here. He also informed the corporation officials about this, but despite this the problem was not resolved.

Vinod Vashisht, a resident of Sector 22, missed bhog ceremony of a relative due to the jam.

“The road dividing sector 22 and 35 including service lanes was full of waterlogging and traffic was moving at snail’s pace. We had to miss a bhog ceremony in Sector 35 as it took me one hour to reach Sector 35 from Sector 22 due to traffic jam due to heavy rain leading to waterlogging and breakdown of many vehicles,” he said.

MC’s claim washes away

As part of every year’s annual monsoon prepardeness, the civic body claimed to have spent Rs 1.25 crore on cleaning the road gullies. But the claims were exposed when almost all major roads of the city were submerged in water.

The civic body has spent over Rs 1.25 crore for merely cleaning the road gullies to ensure monsoon preparedness in the city.

There are around 33,000 road gullies in Chandigarh which were said to be cleaned.

Every year the same standard operating procedure is followed but the city had to face heavy waterlogging.

In the 1.25 crore amount spent, the corporation had said that they had hired 70 more people for cleaning of road gullies and in their salaries, the said amount was spent. Like throughout the year, the civic body has 70 people working but for the monsoon period, they hired 70 more to clean the road gullies.

WHY CHANDIGARH FACES WATERLOGGING EVERY YEAR

Every year over Rs 1 crore is spent for cleaning the road gullies. But even then there is waterlogging.

For, officers said that their “road gullies in Chandigarh cannot handle water if the rain is over 25 mm”. Road gullies in sectors 1 to 30 have capacity of up to 15 mm while road gullies in sectors 30 to 35 can handle upto 20 mm and southern sectors beyond these can handle only up to 25 mm rain.

They stated that there will be waterlogging for some minutes or hours and then water will drain out itself.

On the reason why the capacity of the road gullies can’t be increased, Municipal Corporation had stated that increasing the capacity of road gullies is not a feasible task as huge expenditure is incurred on it.

In 2019 house meeting, MC councillors had raised this matter as to why the waterlogging took place when this hefty amount was spent.

It was also pointed out that the workers pull out garbage from the road gullies and pile up the same near the place and when it rains, it all flows back into the road gullies.