Mumbai: From Tuesday, March 25, the BMC will start the desilting of storm water drains (SWD) in the city, the most crucial pre monsoon activity to accelerate rain water drainage during monsoon and prevent flooding as much as possible. A total of 23 contractors have been appointed for the desilting work.
For the first time, the SWD department will take help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its premonsoon work. The BMC will be tracking the CCTV footage and the contractors are mandated to take photographs and short videos of the desilting work. The video clips will be analysed by the administration to ensure transparency and work efficiency.
Mumbai has around 2000 kilometres open and around 440 kilometres closed storm water drains. The civic body plans to complete 80% of the desilting of all minor and major drains by end of May, i.e before monsoon, 10 percent during monsoon and remaining 10 percent after monsoon. Although work orders have been issued to the respective contractor for desilting of all minor and major drains, the work order for Mithi river, a major storm water drain is yet to be awarded.
Despite extensive work carried by the SWD, Mumbai- an island city not floods every year, but there are annual complaints of improper and incomplete desilting of drains. Thus, the BMC decided to introduce AI, which will ensure quality work with less human intervention.
“Stricter terms and conditions have been included in the contracts this year to ensure proper monitoring of dredging operations and complete transparency in dredging operations. It will be mandatory to submit the photographs before and after the removal of sludge from drains. It is mandatory for the contractors to submit 30 seconds of footage for each job. In case of small drains, pre-desilting and post-desilting footage has been made mandatory. This is to be filmed from the source of the small drain to the outlet (end to end). All these videotapes of silt removal from big and small drains will be checked using AI system,” a statement released by the BMC on Sunday said.
Contractors shall be required to submit videotapes and photographs with date, time, latitude, longitude (realtime geo-tag) and upload them to the relevant software at three stages of work – I.e before commencement of work, during actual work and after completion of work.
At the time BMC has introduced use of AI to monitor works, it has also mandated it’s engineers to be present at the SWD work location to ensure quality, efficiency and completion of work in the given time limit.
