The Drain Crew of Ward Nine

Chennai —

The clearing season starts in the last week of April and has to be finished before the first serious rain, which is a date nobody knows in advance. This is the entire operational problem, and every member of the crew described it in almost the same words.

Ward Nine has 41 kilometers of stormwater channel, of which about 12 are covered and therefore invisible to everyone including, occasionally, the ward’s own maps. Six people clear it. They have two trucks, one of which is shared with another ward on alternating days.

The work is sorted by what is in it

The crew’s foreman, Selvaraj Ponnusamy, has categorized the ward’s blockages into a taxonomy that does not appear in any manual and predicts the season’s difficulty with unnerving accuracy.

• Silt, which is expected, heavy, and cleared with a hook and a bucket at a predictable rate.
• Construction debris, which is not expected, arrives in a single night, and can take a full day per site.
• Packaging, which is light, endless, and travels — cleared from one segment, it reappears two hundred meters downstream after any rain.
• Roots, which require a decision above the crew’s authority and therefore usually remain.

What a day actually clears

On the three days Veyra spent with the crew, the team cleared 380 meters, 240 meters, and 95 meters respectively. The last figure was a single covered stretch behind a market, which took the whole day because the access covers had been paved over during a road resurfacing in 2023 and had to be located, cut, and reinstated.

Ponnusamy has raised the paved-over covers issue in writing four times. The resurfacing contractor is not the same department as the drainage crew, and the covers are not on the resurfacing specification.

This is, in the end, the whole story. The ward does not flood because of rainfall alone. It floods because of the gap between a road department’s schedule and a drainage crew’s, mediated by six people with hooks and no authority over either.

The first heavy rain arrived nine days after we left. The ward reported standing water at two junctions, both in the southern quarter, which the crew had not reached.