A drainage pumping station in Kidderpore’s Kabitirtha in southwest Kolkata, which promises to reduce waterlogging in parts of Kidderpore and adjoining areas, will be inaugurated on Friday.
The pumping station, built by Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), will serve places like Ram Kamal Street, Ramanath Pal Road, Satya Doctor Road, Gopal Doctor Road and Garden Reach Road, among others.
All these places get inundated multiple times every monsoon and water reaches up to the knee-level.
The new drainage pumping station will help drain out water from these places faster, officials said. Civic engineers said the whole of Ward 76 and portions of Ward 77 would benefit. “Water from these pockets of Kidderpore used to go to a drainage pumping station in Mominpore through underground sewer lines. From the Mominpore station, the water would be drained towards Kolkata’s east,” said an engineer of the KMC’s sewerage and drainage department.
“The areas in Kidderpore that used to get waterlogged easily were at the tail-end of the command area of the Mominpore pumping station. Rainwater from the waterlogged pockets in Kidderpore used to be drained out only after water from other places was drained out,” said the engineer.
Once the station at Kabitirtha, built at a cost of Rs 41 crore, is functional, water will be drained out faster from these pockets.
A drainage pumping station uses high-powered pumps to drain out water from an area. Water from the command area reaches the station through canals. If the canals are silted, the flow of water will reduce and lesser volume will reach the pumping station.
Engineers said the new pumping stations would serve their purpose if the canals or underground sewers were dredged properly.Rainwater accumulating on roads will go to the drainage pumping station at Kabitirtha and from there it will be drained out into Tolly’s Nullah, which merges with the Hooghly.
“On days it rains, the water will be drained out into Tolly’s Nullah. On other days, sewage will be taken to Mominpore and from there to Calcutta’s east through the east Kolkata wetlands,” said one KMC engineer.
Draining out sewage into a river is not allowed without reducing pollutants to an extent that the river’s ecosystem is not affected. During the monsoon, however, the water flowing through the sewer network can be directly drained into the river as the rainwater dilutes the pollutants’ density.
