A booster pumping station will come up at Marcus Square on College Street in north Kolkata to replace the one at Mohammad Ali Park, Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has decided.
The new station will supply drinking water to large parts of central Kolkata and will come up within two-and-a-half years, KMC officials said.
“The estimated cost of the project is Rs 40 crore. The new pumping station will have a four million gallon capacity, same as the one at Mohammad Ali Park,” a senior official of the KMC’s water supply department said.
The proposal to build the pumping station was cleared at a meeting of the mayoral council on Wednesday.
The booster pumping station will help increase the pressure and the flow of water distributed from the Tallah water pumping station to large parts of north and central Kolkata.
At Mohammad Ali Park, an underground reservoir with an arch-shaped roof was built during the British rule to store water.
For several decades fire tenders used to source water from here. In 1998, the KMC set up a booster pumping station underneath the park.
“After a portion of a boundary wall at the park collapsed resulting in water leakage a few years back, we got an opportunity to examine the pumping station thoroughly,” said a senior engineer. “The idea to construct a new pumping station had surfaced then.”
On March 31, 2019, a portion of the boundary wall of the pumping station at Mohammad Ali Park had collapsed and water gushed out, leaving Chittaranjan Avenue flooded for several hours.
Days later, a team of teachers from Jadavpur University inspected the park and spotted a number of cracks on the reservoir’s arch-shaped ceiling. Subsequently measures were taken to strengthen the walls of the reservoir.
The Durga Puja at Mohammad Ali Park was confined to a small area on the park that year with engineers fearing a possible cave-in because of the weak wall of the underground reservoir.
Officials from the civic body said they have already identified a vacant plot of government land at Marcus Square where the booster pumping station would be built.
