Monsoon flooding, an annual feature here

The first thing that strikes you about Chickpet, Avenue Road and Balepet areas is that they are the most important trading markets in the ‘’city’’ part of Bangalore, as opposed to the Cantonment area.

You would think of jewellery, saris, textiles, aluminium, hardware and the like. But during rainy season, all you would think of would be narrow roads, congestion, heavy traffic, drainages full of muck and leaking water that puts off both traders and customers.

More than the traffic and congestion, it is the drainage system here that bothers traders. The underground drain connections have been built almost 50-70 years back. While the surface areas around the manholes have been repaired to an extent, lot remains to be done in the underground networks.

Avenue Road Commercial Association president G V Sridhar says the rainy season is really bad for the place. “The entire area is flooded with water that gushes into shops. Owners have had to spend whole days to remove water from their inundated shops. If the underground drainage system absorbs water well, then the surface flooding may not occur.” Shops have seen inundation of almost four to six feet on several roads around Cottonpet and Balepet too.

Trader Dileep agrees that the rains disrupt normal life every year. “Come rains and the corporation workers are here. They do remove the excess sewage from the manholes, but dump it right next to these structures. Whenever there is a second shower and when people walk around, the sewage goes right back in. Water then leaks onto the road.”
Abdul Kareem, employee of a wood trading firm, says flooding here is perpetual. “We have to jump from one dry spot to another. Some silt is removed, but there is no good back-up after removal. The sewage has to be put in a designated place outside the area, but that isn’t happening.”

Even if the roads are tarred, a good rain washes away the asphalt . You see potholes

all along the shops. Water gets collected. The depth of the potholes keeps increasing owing to the traffic. The water from these potholes does not always flow into the drains because the road is not slopy enough. If the drainage network has to absorb water, the internal systems of the drains will have to be examined to understand them.

The area is facing a macro problem that repeats season after season. Given that the entire Avenue Road area is low-lying, is there any chance at all to keep the area free of water? This is a question no one wants to answer. If there’s an answer, the only thing that people say is the drains have to be fixed. There is no acknowledgement that the commercial area has been built on water tanks and lakes of yore that were a feature of the “city” face of Bangalore.

The tanks and lakes have depth and would slope towards the centre with a wide surrounding area. If foundations are built on this, altitude of the buildings would be low. Historically, the area has grown out of the depths of tanks and lakes. Therefore, there is no easy solution to flooding, because there is no easy passage for water to flow. The macro solution here would be to network the drains differently to allow easy flow of water.

Sridhar says the problem is acute during monsoon. “During winter and summer, the area is dry and the overall civic condition is better. But, roads are very badly damaged when it rains here. There is also dumping of sewage and not carrying it out of the area. This needs to be addressed urgently if the drains are to be kept clean and free for water to flow. We have to take a macro view of the drains in the low-lying areas and introduce alterations where necessary.”