137 ponds in Gurgaon’s green belts to help check flooding during rains

Gurgaon: The Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) will develop 137 ponds in the city’s green belts to retain rainwater and prevent flooding, an inevitable fallout of a spell of heavy rain in a city crippled by poor drainage and destruction of its natural water channels because of concretisation and urban development.
Officials said the decision was taken during a meeting of the GMDA’s residents advisory council on Friday, and directions were given to agencies, including the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG), to begin work.
Speaking to TOI, a senior GMDA official said, “Waterlogging in the city and the use of green belts to resolve the problem was discussed extensively in Friday’s meeting. It was decided that Gurgaon should be made completely free of waterlogging, and ponds in green belts will be used to help achieve this goal. The main motive is that rainwater should not flow onto roads.”
There are several ponds in Gurgaon’s green belts that are very old but have dried out over the years and are lying neglected, the official added. “A total of 137 such ponds have been identified by GMDA, and a decision has been made to develop them so that rainwater gets diverted to ponds instead of inundating roads. The ponds will also act as catchment areas. This will spare commuters and residents several problems that crop up every monsoon. Once these ponds are ready, rainwater will flow directly into them and the waterlogging issue will be resolved to some extent,” the official further said.
GMDA has already adopted a similar strategy to prevent waterlogging along the Golf Course Road, which remained largely unaffected by the rains this year even though it was one of the worst-affected stretches in the city during the same period in 2020.
GMDA officials said to prevent flooding this time, they built three check dams along creeks in the Aravalis near Golf Course Road over the past year, which led to rainwater being diverted to the forest area before it could reach the stretch. Several native species were also planted around these creeks so that the soil doesn’t become loose and the embankments don’t give way.
On August 19 last year, almost 120mm of rainfall had left several parts of the city inundated, including parts of Golf Course Road. The underpass in DLF-1 was completely submerged as a result. It had taken DLF, which manages the underpass, two days to finally pump out all the water and reopen it for traffic.
The inundation of Golf Course Road had taken government bodies completely by surprise, as the stretch had not appeared anywhere in the critical points list that they had prepared. DLF had blamed the city’s “insufficient drainage infrastructure”.