Civic body asked to clean all drains by May 15

PATNA: Divisional commissioner Sanjay Kumar Agarwal on Monday instructed the Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC) officials to ensure the cleaning of all manholes, catch-pits and drains before the onset of monsoon. He asked the officials to identify the water-chronic areas in advance and plan the ways to minimise waterlogging in such localities during heavy rainfall.
Agarwal, after a meeting to review the status of desiltation of drains with municipal commissioner Himanshu Sharma and other officers, said the cleaning operation was affected due to illegal constructions on both sides of the drains.He asked the civic body to remove the encroachments from big drains.
“All the drainage cleaning works should be completed by May 15 while the nine big drains need to be cleaned by April-end. The civic bod needs to form a team and visit all the small drains and ascertain the reason of their blockage. Apart from cleaning of drains, the sump houses and motors that pumped out water from different areas during the rainy season need to be fixed to ensure that there will be no obstruction,” he said and added: “Amid the pandemic, the sanitation workers will be provided with safety gear-masks, gloves and sanitisers and work on roster basis.”
The PMC has already started desilting of drains from April 1. It has engaged more than 2,000 sanitation workers for the work. It has pressed machineries like JCBs, bobcat, Poclain Hydraulics, super suction machines, tipper silt, skid-steer loader, haiwas and tractors for the removal of garbage from the drains.
For the cleaning of small drains and manholes, robotic scavenging machine has been pressed into use to unclog the sewers.
Himanshu said around 50% of the work on big drains and 40% on small drains had been completed. “We will achieve the target of unclogging all the drains by mid-May,” he added.
There are nine big, 14 medium and 172 small drains besides 40,373 manholes and 35656 catch-pits in the Patna municipal area.