Agency gets breakfast for kids, ambulance for Metro evacuees

KOLKATA: The Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation (KMRC) has ensured that the evacuees from Brabourne Road don’t face any inconvenience during their stay at the hotel they have been put up in.
The executing agency of the East-West Metro project has arranged for milk and bread for 22 kids who leave for school from the hotel they are staying in long before the kitchen starts functioning.Additionally, Afcons, the agency that is constructing the tunnel, has stationed an ambulance round-the-clock near the hotel to be available to the three pregnant women among the evacuees should they need it. The number of the ambulance driver was also shared with all the evacuees.
KMRC and Afcons have set a high benchmark of taking care of evacuees for any mega infrastructure project which might necessitate permanent or temporary relocation of residents. The 158 residents of two unsafe buildings — 42, Strand Road and 2, Raja Woodmunt Street — and 45 residents of 111, Netaji Subhas Road were shifted to two hotels on Mahatma Gandhi Road before the passage of the tunnel boring machine underneath.
“We are moved by the gestures of Afcons officials who visit us daily to check whether we have any issues. We were quite surprised when they arranged an ambulance after knowing that three of the residents of 42, Strand Road were in advanced stages of pregnancy. We are having a lot of fun in the hotel,” said Shreya Dubey, a student of a north Kolkata college who checked into the hotel on Wednesday.
Away from the hotel, their house is in the safe custody of Afcons engineers. Afcons has installed 42 CCTV cameras in the evacuated houses so that no sabotage can be committed. “We are quite assured by the range of measures the engineers have adopted,” said Nil Kamal Ghosh, secretary of the tenants’ association of 42, Strand Road. The grouting, a treatment that involves injecting a structure-strengthening chemical to the century-old foundations, will extend the life of the buildings by another 100 years.
On Saturday, 42 residents of 111, N S Road were also shifted to Hotel White House. Though they were supposed to be shifted on Tuesday, the precarious condition of the building led to the early relocation. This building was not on the list of nine ‘very unsafe buildings’. But after Afcons engineers surveyed the structure, they decided on its evacuation.