With the rains hitting the national Capital, the Delhi High Court on Wednesday directed all the municipal corporations and the Delhi Government to indicate whether the drains in the city have been de-silted to ensure roads and colonies are not flooded.
A Bench of Justices Sanjeev Sachdeva and AK Chawla took up the issue as a PIl after coming across a media report which said that several sewage and storm-water drains in the city have not been de-silted.
The Bench issued notice to the Delhi Government, the three corporations, the Delhi Jal Board and the Irrigation and Flood Control Department and sought their reply by June 28 on the PIl initiated by the court on its own.
It directed the authorities to file affidavits indicating the number of drains in their jurisdiction, steps taken for de-silting and clearing them to ensure free flow of water and sewage as well as photographs of the current status of the drains.
Meanwhile, work to clean up the Kushak drain near South Extension Part-II has begun, the PWD said on Wednesday, three days after the Delhi High Court warning that non-removal of rubble from the channel could lead to jail for the department officials.
The Public Works Department (PWD) submitted a status report with photographs before a Bench of Justices Sanjeev Sachdeva and AK Chawla which noted that while the department has started clearing the rubble, substantial work remains to be done.
The status report by the PWD came pursuant to the court’s warning on June 16 that the department’s officials would be sent to jail for claiming to have cleaned the drain when no such work had been done on the ground.
It had given the department time till Monday to show it was working to clear the drain of construction rubble and carry out de-silting.
The court took on record the PWD’s report and its claim that all the debris from the drain would be cleared by June 25-26 and asked it to file a report on June 28, the next date of hearing, indicating the status of the work.
The court told the department that its report should also contain photographs of the site, taken from the same angles as the pictures placed before the Bench today.
It also told the PWD that the construction rubble and garbage removed from the drain should be not dumped at the site, but at a landfill. The court’s order came after perusing the status report filed by the PWD claiming it was clearing the drain.
However, Manjeet Singh Chugh, a resident of the area, contended that hardly any work has been done by the civic agency. The court was hearing a PIl initiated by it in 2012 on the issue of water-logging in the South Extension Part II area and in which it has passed orders from time to time to the PWD to clear rubble from the Kushak nullah.