Hazardous holes

“It’s an issue of negligence,” said Ashok Bhattacharjee, director of the Unified Traffic and Transportation Infrastructure (Planning and Engineering) Centre (UTTIPEC). “There is no system of checking or monitoring of uncovered drains. The people who are constructing them should also be responsible for managing them later.”

UTTIPEC, an organization operating under the Delhi Development Authority with members from all the key transport and planning departments, has produced both street and pedestrian guidelines in the past couple of years to try to make Delhi’s pavements safer. The problem, says Bhattacharjee, has been the mentality that the roads are primarily for vehicles, putting pedestrians in second place.

“Pavements have always been neglected,” he said. “They need to be retrofitted using our guidelines. Once you start talking about street design there are so many things involved. It’s not just open drains but street lighting and women’s safety also.”

The lack of adequate street lighting in many areas of Delhi seems to exacerbate the dangers of walking on the roads. On 26 June, Sardool Singh, a 72-year-old man from Rajouri Garden in west Delhi, was killed after he fell into a three-feet-deep drain near his home. According to news reports, Singh didn’t notice the open pit in the middle of the footpath as the light was fading.

And the dangers posed by open drains in Delhi are not just physical. Aidan Cronin, a specialist at UNICEF’s water, sanitation and health department, says that open drains in the city are also a serious health hazard, especially during the monsoon, when high water levels make drowning more likely and spread diseases more quickly. “Open drains are dangerous as they can act as a breeding ground for mosquitoes, but also they are a safe haven for rats and all sorts of vermin so they can be a real public health danger,” Cronin said via email.

In a city that has suffered from a severe water shortage in the last few months, illegal borewells (dug without government permission by residents who often have no other access to water) are another serious hazard, judging by the number of accidents that have occurred in or near them in recent months.

And the problem is not limited to the capital. On 9 July, another four-year-old was rescued after falling into a borewell in a Maharashtra village near Aurangabad. In Bhubaneswar, in 2008, 32-year-old doctor Surya Narayan Gochhayat fell to his death down a 15-ft-deep drain onto iron construction rods.

In some states, efforts have been made to reduce the dangers of open drains and borewells. In 2003, responding to yet another child death, the Tamil Nadu government passed the Ground Water (Development and Management) Act, making it mandatory to get permission from the state government before sinking a borewell and for local authorities to monitor the work and to ensure that abandoned or unfinished borewells were immediately covered.

It also reduced the diameter of such wells, concluding that there was no need to dig a pit more than six inches wide to access water. That makes it difficult for anyone, even a child, to fall into a borewell.

Praveen Kumar, the Gurgaon administrator of Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA), didn’t seem impressed by this fact. “In the case of Mahi, I measured that borewell myself. It was just 8 inches in diameter. The reason for her choking to death very quickly was the narrowness of the hole,” he said.

In the National Capital Region, civic groups and local residential bodies have protested the alarming frequency with which accidents continue to happen. Bhawani Tripathy, president of Mission Gurgaon Development, a civic organization formed by residents of Gurgaon to promote governance and development issues, said the city government needs to be “more sensitive towards life in general”.