A Morning's Rain Brings Smart City Gurgaon to its Knees

New Delhi: The Smart City tag of Gurgaon was washed away by two hours of rain on Thursday. As the arterial Gurgaon-Faridabad road took on the appearance of a river, traffic crawled at the peak office hour, resulting in huge jams on both sides and a 6-km stretch took over 3 hours to cross.

Near the Sikandrabad Metro station, a road had caved in, creating a huge crater at least one storey deep over an underpass. Locals said they considered themselves lucky that no major accident had occurred there.

Things had not improved much by late afternoon, when NDTV visited the spot. The water stood knee-deep on the highway. The crater at the cave-in gaped. The civic workers, who had to use a ladder to reach its bottom, struggled to shore up the subway roof to prevent further cave-ins.

A few km from Sikandarabad metro station, on the Gurgaon-Faridabad Highway, things were no different, and cars were swimming through water-logged roads.

The residents say a natural drain in the area has been filled up by the builders, which leads to water-logging every year, and repeated complaints to the authorities have yielded no results.

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"We were promised that a JCB machine will come and drain the old nullah, which will end the problem," said a local. The problem, they say,  has been around for over two years.

Built 15 miles south of Delhi, Gurgaon had been billed as the Millennium city by the Haryana government.

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But it had always been dogged by infrastructure issues, including the lack of a functioning sewer or drainage system, reliable power or water supply and a proper garbage disposal system.