Even after spending crores of rupee on the relaying and upgrading the city's sewer lines under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), civic body can hardly heave a sigh of relief that they have given the city dwellers respite from waterlogged streets during the monsoons. Thanks to the century old sewer lines and age-old pumps at various pumping stations. Moreover, engineers are also skeptic about the fate of these pumps once de-silting and sewerage-relaying projects under the JNNURM are completed. Once the silt is cleared from the sewers, the water pressure will increase. This will lead to an increased pressure on the pumps making them prone to break-downs, a civic engineer added. "There has to be some sort of augmentation of the pumps' capacity. If the capacity is not augmented, they would not be able to handle the excess pressure because of the JNNURM projects,' an engineer said. Civic engineers pointed out that there are at least 96 pumps in the 18 pumping stations of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC). Interestingly, the average age of these 96 pumps are 35 years while some even completed 50 years. There are seven "new' pumps and the age of these "new' pumps are only 15 years. In fact, civic engineers also claimed that while the maximum longevity of these pumps are 10 to 12 years, the continuous usage for over three decades has led to a substantial reduction in their capacity. Moreover, these pumps have been subjected to heavy wear and tear due to the filth in water that is pumped out of the sewers. "Capacity of these pumps have been reduced by almost 40 per cent. Finding spare-parts for these old pumps is another problem,' an engineer said. In fact, finding parts for these pumps is so difficult that the civic body sometimes makes these spares locally. Meanwhile, some engineers also pointed out that in the year 2006, plans to augment the capacity was taken. A private agency was also asked to provide a detailed report about the present pumps and how they were to be phased out. However, these plans never materialised.