GUWAHATI, March 13 � The forecast of rains in the coming days has made the people of Guwahati apprehensive about the fate of their roads and localities once again, especially in the areas where drain cleaning has not been completed yet.
A lackadaisical attitude of the authorities clubbed with lack of civic sense among people compounds the problem of water-logging in most of the areas of the city. Ironically, despite a huge expenditure incurred on cleaning of drainage and de-siltation of the rivulets every year, artificial floods have remained a perennial problem of the city that is aggravating with every passing year.
Meanwhile, the slow pace of cleaning sewerage in small lanes and bye-lanes in many localities of the city has irked the common people. Unlike the arterial roads, which face flash-floods for a few hours on the rainy days, these small alleys bear the brunt of water-logging for several days in a row. During last year�s moonsoons, many areas of the city including the Panbazar, Chandmari, Lokhra, Tarun Nagar, Anil Nagar, Rajgarh, etc., faced the worst of water-logging.
�Unless the small lanes and bye-lanes are cleaned properly and a proper scientific plan is chalked out to solve this recurrent problem, people would face the same problem time and again,� said Niren Deka, a resident of Panbazar.
Remembering the harrowing time he had while returning from his office on many of the evenings last year, Deka said that this problem should be dealt with more seriously by the authorities, as Guwahati is not just the capital of Assam, but the biggest hub of the North-east.
�Everything � starting from trade and transport to the day-to-day routine of the common people � comes to a grinding halt due to this problem,� he mentioned.
Other than the apathy on the part of the authorities, people also blamed the lack of supervision on the workers, which provides them an opportunity to neglect their duty.
�The work of cleaning drains inside the city, mostly done by the workers appointed by the Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) and a private company, has not been able to bring any change despite all their tall claims, believe the citizens.
�Drain cleaning is not being done in the interior parts of the city, where no senior staff of the civic body ever visits for inspection. The workers who are given the task of cleaning often do not take their work seriously. Due to lack of inspection, most of the time the drain cleaning work is half done, which hardly helps in solving the problem,� a resident of Anil Nagar said.
