Between midnight on Monday and Tuesday afternoon, Jodhpur Park received over 290mm of rain, records shared by the civic body showed.

A senior engineer of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said rain that usually pours over a month came down in just over 12 hours.

Residents of the leafy south Calcutta neighbourhood said roads and pockets near their homes that they had never seen inundated — or at least not in a long time — went under water.

There was knee-deep water on the Anwar Shah Road Connector, near Jadavpur police station, at 6.30pm on Tuesday. The KMC engineer said they had never struggled so much to drain water from Jodhpur Park and surrounding roads.

“When I left home at 3pm, I couldn’t take my car through the road in front of Jodhpur Park post office. While returning, there was so much water on the Anwar Shah Road Connector that I feared my car’s engine would get affected,” said a resident.

The water body inside a park in the neighbourhood breached its bank.

“Jodhpur Park received intense rain on Monday. There was a fresh round of intense rain from Tuesday morning. The back-to-back volume led to the waterlogging,” the KMC engineer said.

He added that many parts of Calcutta also got large volumes of rain, though not as much as Jodhpur Park. “Many of the canals that drain out water from the city were filled to the brim. They hardly had the capacity to take more water.”

Calcutta’s drainage system is designed to drain 6mm of water every hour. “If it rains 6mm uniformly, the system can handle it. But in reality, some areas get much more. Waterlogging is inevitable in such a situation,” the official said.

Between 1am and 3pm on Tuesday, the Maniktala drainage pumping station received 102mm of rain; Palmer Bridge near Sealdah received 103mm; Thanthania, 97.4mm; Ultadanga, 88mm; and Ballygunge (at Park Circus), 82mm.

The official said the heaviest rain occurred from early Tuesday till late morning.

A woman from Kasba who took an early morning train from Sealdah said it rained throughout her commute. “I left home at 4.50am. It was raining in Kasba, Ballygunge, Park Circus, Entally, and Sealdah. There was no let-up,” she said.

Multiple arterial roads in central Calcutta — Park Street, Camac Street, CR Avenue, SN Banerjee Road, and BB Ganguly Street — were inundated by early morning rain.

At Park Street, KMC workers opened manholes to drain water. A police officer said it had receded by 11.30am. At Camac Street, it took till about 2pm. On BB Ganguly Street, there was shin-deep water even in the evening.

A large volume of rainwater is drained into the Hooghly. But sluice gates remained closed from 10am for about four hours due to high tide, which prolonged
the waterlogging.

KMC records rain at several drainage pumping stations. An official said the figures reflect rainfall over larger surrounding areas.

KMC sources said about 400 high-power pumps across 85 drainage stations ran on Tuesday to drain water from flooded streets. “We installed smaller pumps on roads
and in neighbourhoods that were heavily flooded,” said an official.