BAREILLY: With the weatherman predicting that monsoon will hit western UP within four days, is the city prepared to face it? While Bareilly Municipal Corporation (BMC) officials have claimed that teams are preoccupied in desilting and cleaning drains round the clock, residents find scarcely any change on ground zero . They fear that like previous years, this time too they will face problems of waterlogging, overflowing and choked drains and a host of water-borne diseases.Municipal commissioner Rajesh Kumar Shrivastav has claimed that 75% of drains in city have been cleaned up but he adds that until use of polythene is banned completely, no change will be visible as every day, quintals of polythene are dumped into drains, choking them again.It is in this context that in-charge minister of Bareilly, Brijesh Pathak, had expressed his anguish over the filthy drains during his surprise visit to the city on June 21 and warned officials concerned to be ready to face the music if the picture did not change before monsoon arrived. TOI retraced the route taken by the minister and visited the same spots Pathak had gone to five days ago to check the progress on desilting of drains.The BMC's exaggerated claims that the drains were taken care of proved to be a wash out last week after the city experienced a pre-monsoon shower for half-an-hour last week. Clogged with filth, the drains started to overflow and waterlogging was seen in various parts of the city, laying bare BMC's "preparation" for the monsoon. Tarun Agrawal, whose residence is situated near a drain in Brahmpur locality, said, "The drain that flows through the middle of the city starts near the BMC office and empties out into river Nakatia. Several culverts are built up on it. Over the years, the lanes adjacent to the drain have risen as a result of repeated layering whereas the all culverts have remained below the level of the lanes. When it rains, these culverts simply disappear under drain water."The filthy water enters our houses and rises up to two feet. Before the monsoon commences, the BMC sanitation workers come to fulfill a formality of cleaning up the drain but they never dig the sludge out of it. Actually the drain is desilted on paper only leaving our woes unaddressed."During his visit, Pathak took stock of the drain cleanliness drive and expressed his disappointment over the role of BMC officials. Giving them 10 days to clean up their act and the drains, he had instructed them to completely scrape the sludge from the bottom of the drains. He had also said government would examine how much funds were used in the name of cleaning the drains in the past five years.

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