The newly elected mayor of the Vadodara Municipal Corporation Balkrishna Shukla got into a 35 foot deep drainage well of a pumping station and removed two pumps and an iron plate which were blocking the pipe for the last 15 days.
"I decided to go inside the well and I did so after midnight on Monday," Shukla said adding that after a three hour operation, both the pumps and the plate were fished out.
The people of Nizampura and Fatehgunj had been facing hardship due to overflowing drainage lines as the Suez pumping station was not functioning at full capacity.
The sewerage and the engineering department staff were reluctant to get inside the well to remove the pumps, citing court's directives and rules and regulations, thus Shukla volunteered and went inside the well.
After six sewerage workers died due to suffocation in different incidents in the past couple of years, the VMC had stopped asking these workers to get inside the drainage line for cleaning. Shukla was accompanied by the head of the drainage section Hemant Jerali.
