Kolkata: New homes for Durga Pithuri Lane residents by December 2024
KOLKATA: The Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation (KMRC) will start handing over new houses – that will come up on Durga Pithuri Lane at Bowbazar – by December 2024.
A K Nandy, spokesperson of the KMRC -which is implementing the 16km East-West Metro Corridor – said on Monday, “If all goes according to plans, we should be able to give possession of the new houses by December 2024. Tendering process for the construction is underway. The construction will start once the soil is firmed up. The houses would have been ready by now, had the fresh subsidence not occurred on May 11.”
Twenty-three houses will be built in an open space at Durga Pithuri Lane once the Metro construction is over. Nandy said, “Two or three more houses may be added to this list once the JU experts, surveying the damages caused by the May 11 accident, submit their report.” He distributed compensation cheques to jewellery unit owners, affected by the second East-West Metro construction fiasco on May 11, at the same cave-in zone of Durga Pithuri Lane, in which 154 residents were displaced and many others from the Bowbazar’s jewellery hub rendered jobless.
Fourteen of these gold and silversmiths have been shortlisted for receiving Rs 1 lakh compensation each. Their workshops were located in the damaged buildings locked up for safety following the subsidence caused by water seepage inside the Metro shaft at Durga Pithuri Lane on May 11.
The shaft had to be built because of the first East-West Metro construction fiasco – to retrieve giant tunnel boring machines (TBMs) that had dug the East-West Metro tunnels. On 31 August 2019, one of the TBMS had hit an aquifer, causing a large-scale subsidence and building collapses at Bowbazar.
The May 11 subsidence was a rerun of the August 31 2019 disaster, in which around 700 residents had been shifted to hotels. The KMRC later repaired 44 houses and brought their occupants back. But 23 houses had either collapsed or had been razed for safety, rendering several families homeless. Most of these razed houses were around Durga Pithuri Lane, now referred to as the “cave-in” zone.
Currently, 72 families are dwelling in flats rented by the KMRC as they are waiting for their homes to be rebuilt in the open space on Durga Pithuri Lane. The KMRC hopes to start building the houses from February 2023 and handing them in phases by December 2024.