A portion of the wall on the backside of the Mallika Malacha housing complex has lost its alignment and is leaning outward. The bottom half of the wall has collapsed and if the top, along with an iron grille and barbed wire fencing, is still standing, it is because of a bamboo pole scaffolding put in place underneath to prop it up.
Residents blame the state of their boundary wall on the New Town Kolkata Development Authority. “RVNL (Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd) is building the New Town Maintenance Depot for Metro Railway behind us. In between their land and our wall there is a canal flowing by. The NKDA possibly wanted to protect the Metro land from water seepage from the canal. But they dug up its side so close to the foundation of our wall that during monsoon, it partially keeled over,” said Debanjan Roy, secretary of Mallika Malancha Apartment Owners’ Association.
Since then, for the last seven-eight months, they have been following up with NKDA. “We have sent emails to them thrice, the last dated December 19. Our security manager has met officials at NKDA Bhavan. We have only been given assurances about action to be taken without any mention of a timeline,” he said.
Residents point to the unfinished end of the box culvert placed on the periphery canal. To the right is Metro Railway land
The damage, residents say, could have been avoided if NKDA had collaborated with them. “All it needed was a safeguard for our wall before they started digging. What compounded the problem was the fact that they left the job of installing the precast concrete box culvert in the canal bed half-done. A barrier they had created to prevent backflow in the canal while they were working, gave way soon after. This meant the water in the untouched part of the canal flowed back and made the dug-up clay on the sides even softer, leading to the wall collapsing.“
The other problem the residents of the Action Area IIB complex are worried about is drainage from their complex taking a hit. “There are four drainage channels that carry the stormwater from our premises into the canal. Look at the end point of this channel. It is no longer reaching the water as clay has been dumped along the side of the box culvert. They have left a hole at its side but it is far smaller than the opening of our pipe. The mouth of another outlet has got clogged with the dug-up clay. If they extend the box culvert, the other two outlets further up will also be affected,” said Rathin Mitra, another resident.
Officialspeak
A senior NKDA official informed The Telegraph Salt Lake that work would begin “within 10 days or so”.
“The tender process is over. We have covered some part of the periphery canal as the place was getting dirty. We plan to develop the space on both sides in phases once it is reclaimed for gardening and landscaping,” he said.
If the canal has been covered only partially, it is because of funds crunch. “We have covered as much of the canal from the starting point as we were sanctioned funds for from the urban development department. We need to send another proposal to cover the rest of the canal. If the department approves it, we can do the work in phases,” he said.
This is not the first canal that the NKDA is covering up. Pilot projects were undertaken in 2024 to stop two other periphery canals from becoming solid waste dumping zones, and by extension, mosquito-breeding grounds. Concrete slabs were used to cover drainage channels while keeping the flow unimpeded in Action Area 1 behind Coal India Abasan, and also in Action Area III, ahead of Shukhobrishti housing complex. While the reclaimed space, which earlier was a cow shed, was to become a part of restored greenery in the first case, in the latter the width of the covered canal allowed a hitherto-narrow roadspace leading to an NKDA community market to be widened.
The drainage outflow canal from the housing complex is not connected to the much narrower recess in the box culvert embedded in the canal in which the housing complex’s canals used to drain.
While at Mallika Malancha, there is uncertainty over whether the rest of the canal will be covered or not, the NKDA official chose to reassure the residents about their wall getting repaired. “The agency, which did the work, has been asked to do the brickwork and plastering needed for repairs. It will be taken up in the course of this phase of work (which will reclaim and renovate the sides of the covered stretch of the canal).”
Sharing his take on why the wall got damaged, he referred to the deluge of September. “The accumulated rainwater during that period must have put pressure on the wall from inside the complex and our dug-up clay also subsided.”
Informed about the residents’ worries about their outflow getting blocked by the box culvert, he said a drainage channel was to be built at a side, which would flow into the covered drain. “We will create a drainage network to ensure the run-off water flows through our drainage channels and falls into the covered drain. That is precisely why we have created holes on the sides of the culvert,” he pointed out.
Write to saltlake@abp.in