Andhra Pradesh   

Floods: time to check illegal, haphazard ‘colonisation’

Nature’s fury: Temporary hutments and semi permanent houses on river banks suffer damages.

ADILABAD: The location of areas that were ravaged by floods earlier this week in Adilabad once again bring home the fact that there is a need to curb unauthorized and haphazard ‘colonisation’. Almost all the houses in urban areas that were damaged were situated on riverbanks and sometimes even on tank beds.

Another fact that has emerged is the obliteration of the course of some old streams and rivers that apparently resulted in over spilling of river banks and sometimes even in change of the course itself. This factor also caused inundation of fields on the riverbanks that were recently brought under cultivation.

Dasnapur river, that was the cause of sorrow for hundreds of families in the slums of Adilabad town, and Bangaruguda stream that caused extensive damage to agriculture fields are a couple of examples. While ‘house plotting’ blocked upstream the course of the former, the banks of the latter were eroded due to mining of gravel.

On the fateful nights of August 4 and 5 the rivers came into spate as a result of the cloud burst. “The intensity of rain was an unusual phenomenon. It was a deluge that most of the rivers and streams could not hold,” pointed out Sushil Deshpande, Deputy Executive Engineer, Irrigation.

Waters from a flooding Dasnapur river flattened the temporary and semi-permanent households along its banks. Most of the affected families along its banks in Hanumannagar, Ramnagar, Subhashnagar, Ranadivenagar and Gandhinagar lost valuable items like refrigerators, TVs and even LPG cylinders. The breaching of a water tank at Tantholi so flooded the Bangaruguda vagu that it changed course near the road dam on the Satnala road. In the process it eroded top soil in a large extent of cultivated land and damaged the road and the bridge. The Kolipur slum area that had sprung up four years back on the Bada Talab tank bed looks like it will be partially submerged in the days to come.

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