India, July 17 -- Buried under decades of waste and neglect, a slice of Delhi's Mughal-era engineering has begun to breathe again. The irrigation and flood control (I&FC) department has cleared two of the three water bays-arched openings-of the Barapullah drain that runs under the nearly 400-year-old Barapullah bridge, restoring water flow and marking the first major clean-up effort on the structure in decades.

Once a key stormwater conduit for the city, the drain had been choked by years of unregulated dumping and encroachment, reducing its capacity to just 10%, officials said. As part of a wider desilting drive that began in August 2023, over 1.4 million metric tonnes of silt have now been excavated from the Barapullah stretch, they ad...