Without planning, and raising systems to address different problems, we can have no modern day city, or a town. The way population is increasing, and the land for housing is squeezing, we might need a plan for villages as well. The element of planning, and scientific usage of resources available, is a must for any city to be liveable. In case of Srinagar much has gone in a wrong direction for last so many years.
The result of wrong planning, in fact absence of planning, is in front of us all. We have unorganised residential areas. We have chaotic market places. We have a deluge of vehicles but very less parking slots. The population in the city has increased manifold in the last couple of decades, given the influx of people from all sides into the city. Cumulatively it has resulted in the phenomenon of crowding.
We have less space for too many to share. That is the reason the systems are not working to the optimum, and there is a kind of breakdown in the services that are normally available in a city. All this demands that the city is imagined afresh and its systems are overhauled, or laid a new. One of the crucial systems needed by a city like Srinagar is drainage.
There are now no areas in this city that have the advantage of a natural drainage. Even the areas in the city that are situated at a raised ground, and where the sewage and rainwater can flow down gravitationally, have no final exit points. The waste from these areas is finally to be collected through a network of underground pipes and after treatment drained into some water body.
The case of the low lying areas is even more problematic. Here the waste flowing through the underground pipes has to be lifted by pumps and then drained into some water channel. From past some years we have seen how a moderate rainfall inundates our main roads because of the overflow from the drains.
The condition of the existing drainage system leaves us with no other option than to re-envisage the whole thing. If the concerned authorities have taken the first steps on that, it is a much needed thing. If it really happens, and the city has a Master Plan for drainage system, it can relieve the people living in this city of a perpetual agony.