Ghaziabad: For residents of the trans-Hindon belt, patience has finally run its course. After yet another spell of rain laid bare the region’s long-standing civic troubles, many said they were now planning to approach the court, having lost faith in the civic corporation.Monday’s downpour lasted barely an hour, but was enough to leave roads in Indirapuram, Kaushambi, Vaishali and other trans-Hindon areas waterlogged. In Indirapuram, pipelines left lying along several stretches further narrowed carriageways already buried under slush and mud.TOI reported on July 9 and 10 how road and pipeline work under the Chief Minister Green Road Infrastructure Development Scheme (CM-GRID) has left several stretches excavated for months on end. Key roads around Kala Patthar, CISF Road, Nyay Khand, Gyan Khand and Shipra Suncity have been narrowed or left uneven, with loose soil and construction debris piling up along the edges.Amit Kumar Das, who was driving through a dug-up stretch of Kala Patthar Road on Monday evening to visit a friend at Gaur Green Avenue, said he barely made it through without an accident. Returning late that night, he found the stretch blocked by a pipeline and had to brake so sharply that his car skidded.“The roads are broken, pathways are occupied by pipelines, and the drains stay choked,” said Anil Jain, a former office-bearer of Orange County RWA, describing a sense of helplessness that residents say has become routine.Ghaziabad Municipal Corporation is redeveloping nearly 13km of roads in Indirapuram under CM-GRIDS. But residents say the pace has been slow, and the simultaneous excavation of multiple stretches has only deepened the disruption. The work is expected to continue well into next year.For Alok Kumar, the frustration runs deeper than this monsoon. He filed a petition in Allahabad High Court in 2016 over the township’s drainage system, and said the court’s orders at the time were only partially carried out. The situation, he said, has since worsened to a point that warrants fresh intervention, and he is considering filing another case.Sahibabad MLA and minister Sunil Sharma did not dispute the scale of the problem. “I myself am facing problems,” he said, acknowledging that Monday’s rain had once again exposed the civic mess that Indirapuram and its neighbouring townships have endured for months. Even so, he said, “change is just round the corner”, pointing to ongoing work to build “world-class” roads and asking residents to be patient a little longer.“Rs 350 crore had already been spent on Indirapuram alone, but the project was set back by disruptions to bitumen supply chains in West Asia,” Sharma said. He said the govt had since raised the bitumen rate, but that work was progressing, adding that the township’s infrastructure would be transformed within 18 months.A GMC official said the civic body was overhauling water, road and sewer infrastructure that had gone obsolete over more than two and a half decades, and that disruption was at its peak in areas such as Indirapuram while the work remained under way.
