GUWAHATI: The Kamrup metro district unit of All Assam Students’ Union will soon take up the matter of “random” earth-cutting on the hills of Meghalaya with the Khasi Students Union in Ri-Bhoi district in a bid to mitigate flash floods in the Jorabat area near the Assam-Meghalaya border.
A smart shower on Monday afternoon was all it took to trigger yet another flash flood on NH-37 at Jorabat, causing harassment to commuters with vehicles struggling to wade through the waterlogged tri-junction.
Sources said this was the fourth incident of flash floods in the area this monsoon season.
An important tri-junction, Jorabat connects Guwahati to Meghalaya, Barak Valley, Mizoram and Tripura through NH 6 and Upper Assam through NH-37. But flash floods are now a regular feature in the area during the rainy season with locations such as 9th Mile, 10th Mile and Jorabat the worst affected.
“The situation gets aggravated every monsoon by the loose soil brought along with the water gushing down from the hills of Meghalaya where rampant earth cutting takes place. The mud and soil accumulates and finally clogs the drain in the area, invariably causing floods after a shower,” Dibyajyoti Medhi, general secretary of AASU, Kamrup metro district committee, told The Shillong Times on Tuesday.
“We will soon deliberate with the Khasi Students Union in Ri-Bhoi district and try to find out solutions to this menace of haphazard earth-cutting by unscrupulous elements, which is at the root of the flooding that occurs at Jorabat tri-junction,” Medhi said.
Encroachment and haphazard construction work in the area between Nine Mile and Jorabat also blocks drains, prompting the Sonapur revenue circle authorities to evict about 15 shops beside NH-37 at 9th Mile near North East Cancer Hospital along with around 20 roadside shops at Jorabat on May 14.
However, since then there has been a status quo with the district administration maintaining that further clearance beside NH-40 could not be done as the shop owners had approached the court, which had given temporary injunction till the next date of hearing.
“The drain passing beside the highway is 16-feet wide on the map but a survey would point out that it has been reduced to about three to four feet in some areas.
So, it is time the district administration takes up result-oriented measures to solve this perennial problem in the long term. Encroachments should never be allowed and the law strictly enforced,” Medhi said.
