There is hardly any doubt that grabbing and filling up of canals by the encroachers has rendered the city's drainage system almost inoperative and is responsible to great extent for water-logging during the rainy season. Worse still, many areas in the city are flooded every year as the canals have been encroached upon or reduced to trickles. This year also flood water is finding no natural outlet to flow through and people in the low-lying localities are already facing serious problems. Yet, all this is due to illegal grabbing of canals and the failure of the authorities concerned to counter it. It is a story of public interest getting buried under the clout of muscle and money.

Environmentalists have long been telling us that loss of the natural channels of drainage is a hazardous proposition for a city with such a huge population. But successive governments failed to address the issue in the collective interest of citizens and the canals were grabbed one by one by the local musclemen or politically influential elements. It seems the decision makers never fully realised, or were reluctant to admit, that the canals had to be protected to avert a possible environmental disaster.

The pressure on living space has always been enormous here, but the solution to that problem never lay in occupying the canals which amounted to destroying the city's natural drainage system. It is highly regrettable that despite the problem being identified as an environmental concern of great magnitude, precious little has been done so far to set things right.

The government's plan to reclaim the canals lost to the grabbers needs some determined and quick action to achieve the goal set by the decision makers. Obviously, the readiness to adopt seemingly harsh measures was reflected in some of the schemes initiated by the caretaker government. And now it is dealing with a gross violation of the law that also has a great negative impact on city life. So the only option is to evict the illegal occupants as quickly as possible and allow the canals to come to life once again.