In Panaji’s quaintest quarter, residents live out the monsoon with trepidation

Every year, septuagenarian Maria Luisa De Souza from Mala-Fontainhas spends the monsoon months at her brother’s house in Bambolim. Her ground-plus-one marital home in Panaji’s heritage quarter, where she’s lived for the past 45 years, is now prone to flooding, thanks to the ward’s changing design. Today, the floor of De Souza’s house is at least two feet below the road, and she has no option but to wait till she can return home.
“I will come back in August-September,” she says.
The rainwater turns the house into a wreck — it damages the century-old tiles, makes the walls damp and affects the overall health of the building. And the fact that it’s shut makes it easy prey for burglars, who have struck during the monsoon. “I had called a carpenter to fix a grill on the windows (which almost touch the road), but he hasn’t turned up,” De Souza said. “Every year, I call labourers to do pre-monsoon repair work, but they don’t turn up. This leaves the house vulnerable throughout the monsoon.”
This isn’t a battle only De Souza is fighting. D Chodankar, 76, also from Mala, has raised the level of the threshold to protect his house from incessant rain. “We don’t have any expectations from either the councillor or the government,” he said. “I have been living in this home since birth. My father lived here before that, even prior to the time the Portuguese shifted their capital here (to Panaji). The flooding occurs annually during the monsoon. Every year, we are left to our own circumstances.”
But the water doesn’t have to be inside the house to cause major inconvenience to residents. The family of Aishwarya Chopdekar, a student, has lived at their heritage house for nearly 50 years; this structure is on a raised platform, which keeps the water from entering. “However, sewage water spills out of the gutter during flooding, which poses a risk to health and hygiene,” she says. “The CCP must clean all the drains before the monsoon.
Chopdekar’s mother, who teaches at a Balwadi at Portais, had bigger problems. “Due to floods, water entered a room where sacks of foodgrains were stored,” she said. “It got completely spoiled.” She was not given any compensation from the authorities. “We had to undergo the financial loss ourselves,” she said.
Fundacao Oriente, located in a heritage building in Fontainhas, also can’t escape the waterlogging, as water reaches its premises every monsoon. Last week, the water level rose to such an extent, the Fundacao was forced to cancel an event. “It was worse in 2013,” a source said. “The water reached inside the institute and flooded the art gallery. The municipality never pumps the water out. We are left with no choice but to wait till the rain stops and the flood subsides on its own.”
Aires Pinto Furtado, a lawyer who had filed a suit against the authorities on behalf of the residents of Mala, said that the latter didn’t have plans of the drainage of the city of Panaji, and thus fail to proacively resolve the flooding issue.
“If the main underground drains are located and detected..., the problem will be solved,” he said. “The entire Mala-Fontainhas area had gutters on both sides of the road, connected to broad underground primary drains. In some places, the drains have been filled with tar due to the wrong system of putting down one layer of tar on top of the other previous layer and so on, leading to the spilling of the tar into the drains and simultaneously raising the level of the roads. As a result, roads in most of the places in the area today are between 20–30 cms higher than the original level,” he said.
In the suit, the court permanently restrained the authorities from laying down additional layers of hotmix without first removing the existing asphalted portion. The court allowed civic authorities to add asphalt only where there are potholes, and without raising the existing level of the road.
Pinto Furtado further added that Rua de Ourem has to be lowered because its existing height means the water on the roads gets trapped. “Hence, if the main drain is open and the blockages (if any) are cleared, the water will flow without difficulty whatsoever,” he said. “The existing Portuguese-built drainage system is very good, and there never used to be such flooding as there is now.”