How we created ‘rivers’ of Chandigarh

Arundeep Ahluwalia

I came to Chandigarh from Patiala on a March morning in 1962 to live in a type IX house on the main road adjoining the famous temple of Sector 23, close to the Sector 22-23 crossing. Both sectors were famous, one for ‘gol-gappas’ and the other for its market and Kiran Cinema, now a heritage worth being pictured in the Swiss Publication ‘Chandigarh 1956’.

We used to walk to the Sector 23 government school, partly on road and partly through the choe during the dry season. It used to get flooded when it rained and was fun to wade through, but not when it rained heavily when we had to take a longer route.

The main road looked extremely wide to a Patiala boy, who would miss the open and infamous huge stinking drains of Patiala. Never did the main roads and lanes ever get flooded and during the heaviest of downpours, water would quickly disappear into the underground drains — so safe for all, especially small kids walking to schools.

Gradually, I saw that roads got widened again and again and the green footpaths disappeared. A huge roundabout park near the temple disappeared before my young eyes and it became a part of the Sector 23 road. Then came the speed-breakers.

And that was the beginning of the end of road safety in the city where before and after every speed-breaker, rain would create pools. Here, small kids would play but occasionally even get ‘drowned’.

Roads were still roads and not the ‘rivers of Chandigarh’ as there were huge green footpaths and grassy grounds storing rainwater for a dry day. Artificial rainwater harvesting was not required, nature did it well. Today, the covered drains are clogged with a deadly mix of silt and polythene, plus gutka and other empty sachets mixed up in drains, and also the top soil which is no longer the sponge it was, soaking in rainwater.

I often wonder as to which roads of the entire tricity are safe to wade through without my car getting drowned in the ‘rivers’ of the towns. In the heavy rains a few days back, after a wait, I decided to drive from Panjab University to Sector 49, little knowing that the ponds and pools on the way could become deadly rivers of the City Beautiful. I nearly drowned in the river between Sector 36 and 37 twice. With trembling legs and a throbbing heart, I drove against a huge tide of rainwater where cars had been abandoned.

The tide would become atrocious if a bigger vehicle passed on the other side of the divider, which too was hardly visible. From a safe city in which a 12-year-old used to walk to school wading through a natural nullah, I am now a 67-year-old retired professor and environmental scientist who wonders why the green-soaking grounds have gone extinct and the roads of Chandigarh have turned deadly rivers where cars may drown and owners could suffer strokes out of fear.

This was not the Chandigarh I came to as a schoolboy 55 years back. Our vision of urbanisation seems to have decayed and degraded and the city, claiming to become ‘Smart’, is on any rainy day, a network of rivers, deadly or not so deadly.

God save my Chandigarh, as no one seems capable or thoughtful enough. The city needs boats as a standby.

(The writer describes himself as an old schoolboy, now a retired professor, scared of walking or driving in City Beautiful)