Mangaluru: The city is seeing spate of activities in construction of storm water drains. Using manual labour and by pressing JCBs into action trenches are cut to lay storm water drains across the city.

However, even as the city is grabbling to come out of water crisis, a trench was cut at Kadri Toll gate road, for construction of storm water drain where the workers ended up cutting off drinking water pipeline ignorantly.
The water has been gushing out of the pipe, flowing to waste, at a juncture of time when people are struggling to collect a bucket of water.

Those who have cut the trench were not seen anywhere near, while the water continued to flow from the damaged drinking water pipe. As per locals, the trench cutting was supervised by the Mangalore City Corporation officials!

It may be noted that even as the district administration has declared that the water level at Thumbe Vented dam has improved, even today, flats in some of the residential apartments are receiving water during stipulated hours only.

A citizen further pointed out, that such trench cut would pose a lot of problems with the monsoon set to arrive.

Most of the drains constructed have been billed and paid without even inspecting whether water flows swiftly through these drains. It may be recalled that couple of weeks ago a drinking water line was damaged on the same stretch when a trench was being dug.