After being hit by severe delays, works on laying the new sewer line along Maharaja’s Lane at Anayara is expected to resume this week, according to the Water Resources department. The residents, while welcoming the news, said they will be relieved only when the works are finally over and their right to move freely is restored in full.
The narrow street leading off from the Pettah-Anayara road to the national highway was in the news recently after a mechanical glitch delayed the works and scores of houses were literally cut off by waist-high sections of pipes dumped outside their gates.
The contractor hired by the sewerage division of the Kerala Water Authority (KWA) to lay the underground pipeline was forced to halt the works after the horizontal directional drill, used for installing the underground pipeline, developed a snag.
Spares had to be flown in from China. It has reached Chennai via New Delhi and the refitted drill is expected to reach Thiruvananthapuram by Friday by road, said the office of Water Resources Minister Roshy Augustine’s. Steps were being taken to restart the works on Friday evening, it added.
The sewerage pipeline consists of welded sections of a 600 mm-diameter mild steel (MS) pipeline encased in a 900 mm-diameter HDPE (high-density polyethylene) pipe.
Work is expected to be completed by the middle of next week. However, the residents remain sceptical. ‘’We will believe it when the works are over. The residents here have been struggling because of the delay,’‘ said S. Thulaseedharan, secretary of the Maharaja Gardens Residents’ Association. The neighbourhood has around 150 families, and the delay has severely hit around 75 of them.
According to the residents, the KWA had unloaded the pipe sections on their street in mid-March, with the reassurance that the works would be completed quickly. They allege that neither the KWA nor the contractor warned them of the delay after the rig broke down.
In the weeks that followed, the residents found themselves caught in an extraordinary situation. With the large pipes blocking their gates, they found it extremely difficult to step out on to the road. Using their vehicles was out of the question. Large vehicles from elsewhere, including ambulances, found it difficult to access a private hospital in the neighbourhood. Small businesses in the locality also suffered.
‘’Who will come to the shop with this pipe in the way? Who will take the trouble to climb over it?’‘ asks Ramachandran, who runs a small shop on the street. One eatery, caught on the wrong side of the ‘wall,’ has stuck its PhonePe QR Code display stand on the pipe for the convenience of the customers.
In recent weeks, the residents stepped up their protests in a bid to draw the attention of the KWA and the State government. Photographs and video footage of people clambering with difficulty over the pipe sections went viral.
On June 22, the State Human Rights Commission ordered the superintending engineer, KWA sewerage division, to urgently remove the huge pipes. The commission, after studying news reports of the residents’ plight, instructed the officer to submit a report within 15 days after removing the pipes.
