Culprits behind the city water-logging

 This newspaper on Sunday carried a prominent front page news story that says that one major reason behind massive waterlogging and floods in Guwahati is the fraud committed by a section of Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) officers in the name of de-siltation and cleaning of the city’s rivers, streams, drains, and other water channels. The news story, quoting a recent report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), has said that while the GMC carried out a de-siltation operation during 2016–17 and spent a huge sum of money on hiring dumpers and excavators, a reality check by the CAG has revealed that the registration numbers of many of those dumpers and excavators were actually of other vehicles, including two-wheelers and three-wheelers. In certain cases, the registration numbers have also turned out to be those of buses and private cars. Citizens and tax-payers in Guwahati are witnesses to the quality and kind of work GMC does in the name of de-silting and removal of garbage from rivers, streams, drains, and other water channels. The general trend is that only a few metres of a particular drain in a particular locality is cleaned, and that too is half-cleaned, leaving the work incomplete. While citizens wonder what happened to the cleaning or de-silting of the remaining stretch of the drain, GMC officials clear the bills without inspection or spot-verification of the work, for reasons best known to them as well as the contractors. In reality, citizens do not need to know what the CAG has found out. What the CAG has found out has already been witnessed by the taxpayers. Unfortunately, the citizens and tax-payers are not organised enough to catch the contractors and GMC officials by their collars when the work is not done properly. The GMC officials and contractors, who are hand-in-glove in this fraud, thus manage to escape. What the government can probably do is give wide publicity to these kinds of work by putting up signboards and hoardings, pasting posters, and distributing handbills in the respective localities before a work is allotted. This should mention prominently the names of the supervisory GMC officers concerned, as well as those of the contractors concerned, and a group of local residents should be roped in to supervise the work. Bills should not be passed without being endorsed by the local residents. If the government can do this, it will ease the water-logging and flood problems in Guwahati City to a considerable extent.