Every city has its firsts. Gurgaon, too, witnessed for the first time a monsoon congestion that brought the entire city to a grinding halt. People were left stranded for hours on end; schools were shut down for two days. So great was the impact that the DC Gurgaon had to issue prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the CrPC, restricting an assembly of more than 10 people. All it took were a few hours of rain!
The residents are still in shock — if just 5 mm of showers could lead to this, what would the impact be in the event of a heavy downpour? Dr Ashok Taneja, a cardiologist in Gurgaon, worried about his patients, protests, “This is a horrible, unthinkable situation! Just an hour of rainfall can cause this. This is what we get after paying our taxes. In my 56 years of living in Gurgaon, I have never seen such a pitiable situation. Schools have been shut down, offices and hospitals too. Even ambulance service has not been spared. God save Gurgaon! This is the result of poor administration.”
Senior citizens, some of the earliest settlers in Millennium City, agree that they haven’t seen anything like this in Gurgaon before. Mansa Ram Gogia, 76, sharing his surprise, says, “We have seen schools shutting down because of lack of water supply, or even extreme cold in winter, but this is the first time I'm seeing the entire city shut down because of rains and traffic snarls.”
Unabashed, the city administration explains its failure to City Spidey. “The situation has come to this because of a rupture in the Badshahpur drain, caused by storm water pressure from Delhi’s Chattarpur drain. The drains had been cleaned way before the onset of the monsoons. The city gets as little as 5 mm of rainfall, which cannot lead to something like this,” says the commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, TL Satya Prakash.
