Gurgaon: Haryana urban local bodies (ULB) department has directed five municipal corporations to upgrade 684 km of decades-old sewer lines on priority during a meeting chaired by ULB minister Vipul Goel. Officials from municipal corporations of Gurgaon, Faridabad, Karnal, Panipat and Sonipat said they have started surveying old parts of the city to ascertain whether these ageing lines will require replacement or restoring the existing pipeline to a serviceable condition.“Estimates will be prepared post-survey and it will then be sent for administrative approval before we begin work on the ageing sewerage lines of the city,” said MCG chief engineer Vijay Dhaka.City residents have repeatedly raised concerns over sewer overflows, ageing pipelines and heavy waterlogging during monsoon, attributing the problems to the city’s unplanned construction. “All urban villages have an age-old infrastructure. There is uncontrolled growth in these villages, with multi-storeys coming up with the same sewer lines that were laid two to three decades ago. There are illegal connections too, which puts pressure on the main sewer lines of the city, causing sewer overflows that seem beyond repair. These old sewer lines will have to be replaced across the city and not just in certain parts of the city to augment sewer infrastructure,” said Rajesh Gera, a resident of Surya Vihar.Another resident from Sector 40, Abhimanyu Yadav, said the sewer lines in the sector were laid around 20 to 25 years ago. “The sewage is opposite to a slope, which causes recurrent overflow in our area. We have been dealing with this problem for years now. We have complained to MCG a number of times, to no avail.”It was also discussed in that meeting that sewerage and water supply services currently handled by the Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) and Haryana Shahari Vikas Pradhikaran (HSVP) in certain municipal corporations of the state should eventually be transferred to the respective municipal corporations. In Gurgaon, while the bulk water supply is provided by the GMDA, MCG’s role is distribution and maintenance and operations of the internal water infrastructure network. The objective, officials of the ULB said, is to establish a single-agency mechanism for service delivery, reducing coordination issues and improving accountability. However, it was also discussed that the proposal is contingent on strengthening municipal manpower. It was observed that municipal corporations presently lack adequate staff to efficiently manage water supply and sewerage services. It was decided that a proposal for augmenting manpower in municipal corporations would first be prepared and submitted. Only after that would the proposal to transfer these services be placed before the govt for approval.While the existing and ageing sewer lines are under distress, several parts of the city still lack authorised sewer connections. TOI reported on Feb 17 that nearly two-thirds of the city households are not connected to legal sewer lines. Municipal figures revealed a stark contradiction beneath the surface — out of 5.5 lakh households in the city, only 1.8 lakh had authorised sewer connections. With 3.7 lakh homes — a whopping 66.6% — outside the formal sanitation system, most residents either depend on septic tanks or informal disposal channels rather than the city’s official network.
