Residents of Jodhpur Park wade through waterlogged streets. Pictures by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya and Talat Salahuddin

Monday morning’s showers meant no school for Rajyashree Nathak of Gokhale Memorial Girls’ High School. Instead, she spent the day making paper boats and setting them afloat on the waterlogged street outside her door in Jodhpur Park.

While Rajyashree may not have hated being home on Monday, many in Jodhpur Park were forced to wade to work yet again.

The saucer-like topography of the city has rendered Jodhpur Park a zone where water accumulates fast and drains slow.

But to be fair to the authorities, there has been some improvement — till 2005, it would take days for the water to recede after heavy showers, but after the commissioning of the Southern Avenue pumping station, the water now goes down within hours (though often that means 12 hours!).

Will Jodhpur Park ever be free of waterlogging? Civic planners hold out no hope. An engineer of the civic drainage department says the area for some reason was neither included in the Asian Development Bank-funded Rs 1,000-crore Calcutta Environment Improvement Project (CEIP) nor the short-term nikashi (drainage) programme taken up by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC).

Councillorspeak: It is true that Jodhpur Park is a waterlogging-prone area. But it is a shame that the civic authorities have failed to solve this problem for so long. The capacity of the Jodhpur Park pumping station should be increased. Currently, it drains 220 to 240 cusecs of water. If this is raised to 260 to 280 cusecs, it will be a huge relief for the residents. There is a canal here leading to the Vidyadhari river but due to lack of desilting and dredging, there is a backflow. — Ratan De, local Trinamul councillor

Civicspeak: Jodhpur Park is a “lowland” so after heavy rain, water does accumulate. But the problem cannot be solved just by augmenting the capacity of Jodhpur Park pumping station because the accumulated water is discharged through Gariahat pumping station and the sewer lines of Gariahat are at a higher level than Jodhpur Park. This year we cleaned the Prince Anwar Shah box sewer and so the duration of waterlogging has lessened. — Tushar Ghosh, CMC chief engineer (drainage)

Mayorspeak: More rain means more waterlogging in the low-lying areas. This year we are stressing on de-silting the sewer lines so that they can contain more run-off water.