NEW DELHI: Municipal corporations may have to rethink their desilting plans, especially when their headquarters, Civic Centre, and its vicinity were waterlogged after moderate showers in Delhi on Friday afternoon. Waterlogging on many arterial roads led to massive traffic snarls in many parts of the city.

In a major embarrassment to North Delhi Municipal Corporation, Civic Centre’s parking lot was waterlogged, and so was the road leading to the corporation officers’ flats. “It took over an hour for the water to clear. This is the first time, waterlogging has been reported at Civic Centre,” said an official of the North Corporation, which is responsible for the upkeep of the building.

The civic agencies’ failure to desilt the drains was quite visible. And once again, Delhiites were at the receiving end. South Delhi was the worst affected with massive waterlogging being reported on Aurobindo Marg, Vikas Marg, Nizamuddin, Adhchini, Lajpat Nagar, Sangam Vihar, etc.

Manjeet Singh Chugh, a resident of South Extension-I, said, “I was stuck at Lajpat Nagar for a long time. It took me over two hours to get home. There was heavy traffic there.”

The subway in front of the post office at ITO was flooded forcing pedestrians to take to the main road. “What is the point of constructing subways when the government can’t maintain it? The subway at ITO was flooded in angle-deep water. The drains were overflowing,” said Savita, a government employee.

Just hours after the rain, the civic bodies started passing the buck faster than it took Delhi’s roads to be waterlogged. “The area surrounding the Civic Centre is under the jurisdiction of PWD. All arterial roads are with PWD. They have failed in desilting the drains and because of that even the Civic Centre was submerged in ankle-deep water today,” said Ravinder Gupta, mayor, North Corporation.

The waterlogging problem has aggravated ever since PWD has taken over the job of desilting major drains from the civic bodies. And now the two government agencies have been blaming each other for the problem in the city.

Officials added though desilting is a year-long exercise, the ground reality is different. On the other hand, PWD officials have claimed that waterlogging will persist as long as the faulty designs of drains are not corrected.

“When drains were constructed, they were designed to take load of the water that gets accumulated on the road. However, in the recent past water from neighbourhood colonies and residential plots are also getting accumulated, which is why they get choked all the time causing the entire area to be waterlogged,” said a senior PWD official.

In south Delhi, 52,000 metric tonnes of silt was removed from the drains last year as against 32,000 metric tones in the same period this year, according to the latest reports.

Apart from waterlogging, there were reports of tree falling in Nangloi, Aram Bagh, Mangol Puri, Greater Kailash-1, Hari Nagar, Okhla, Dayanand Colony, Lajpat Nagar, Tughlaqabad, Kalu Sarai and Hauz Khas. There were also reports of partial building collapse in Harkesh Nagar and Mandawali.

