Ahmedabad: This monsoon, like every other in recent years, Bopal turned into a bowl. Water pooled across the area, submerging roads and stranding residents, until the neighbourhood resembled the very thing revenue records say has been buried beneath it all along — a lake.The irony sits in plain sight. As Bopal went under, few noticed that one of the buildings ringed by floodwater — the old municipality office — occupies land officially registered as a lake.Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation’s (AMC) South West Zone engineering department had planned to demolish the dilapidated office and build a gymnasium in its place. “During routine verification before taking possession, it was revealed that the plot is registered as a lake in revenue records,” said a senior AMC official. The gym project has been shelved. “The building will now have to come down — because Supreme Court guidelines prohibit any construction on lake land, including the structure a government body built there in the first place,” the official added. Bopal merged into AMC limits in 2020, inheriting a problem that predates the merger by decades. The building now illegally encroaches on a lake and AMC’s own demolition wing must address it.Meanwhile, AMC has been running a demolition drive against private encroachments on lake lands in Chandola, Isanpur and Vatva. The Bopal case reveals the same standard will have to apply to govt-built structures.The case is not isolated. In Saijpur, the local municipality built 40 shops on lake land around 1980 and sold them before the area merged into AMC. The town planning map shows a lake; revenue records call it Government Waste Land. The discrepancy between official records and ground reality is, by now, a pattern. Similarly, in 2022, AMC surveyed the city, identified roughly 142 water bodies and prepared a report to develop them. However, when it sought possession of these sites, Collector rejected 26 of the claims. “The Collector clarified that these 26 survey numbers were not lakes at all, but land allotted for police quarters, BSNL, Hindustan Petroleum, EVM godowns, and the Bullet Train project,” adds an AMC official who was part of the survey.For now, no gym will rise in Bopal. The old office—built by the very authority meant to protect the city’s water bodies—will be demolished. But what happens to the lake beneath it, and whether clearing the site will ease the next monsoon’s flooding, is a question the records have raised but no plan has yet answered.
