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Panshet dam burst: Scenario in Deccan gymkhana, when flash floods inundated in Pune

'It was as if my house was facing the sea,' says a first person account of the scenario in Deccan gymkhana, when flash floods inundated the city after the Panshet dam burst.

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The day Pune was struck by flash floods due to the Panshet dam burst on July 12, 1961, I was 20 years old and attending classes at Fergusson College.

We heard that the college was closing due to some emergency and everyone was told to go home. While leaving the campus, we could see people rushing into the college campus with their belongings.

Hearing about the dam burst and city areas being flooded, I rushed to my house near PYC ground, in the Deccan Gymkhana area. I saw that the water had already reached Goodluck Chowk.
I heard that the dam had burst at around 9 am, and by 11.30 am the water level was at its peak. From the terrace of my house I could see the swelling river, without any barriers. The view was as if my house was facing the sea. On one side of my house, I could see just water that was flowing at a force that could devastate anything in its way.

The International Book Service (IBS), the oldest bookstore in Pune, was started by my late father, Vitthalrao Dixit, on January 1, 1931. The IBS bookstore building is the same as it was then. During the floods my father was at the store with five assistants and many customers.


My father told us that the water level started rising so fast that within a few minutes, the store was flooded and the customers along with the staff had to go to the terrace. The building was intact and my father somehow managed to make his way home.
The next morning, when we went to the store at 8.30 am to see the scale of damage, we found that the entire store was filled with knee-deep sludge and all the books were damaged. Ours was the biggest loss in the retail community, amounting to more than Rs3 lakh.

With the help of some friends, we cleaned the bookstore of all the mud and water. In the following days, we kept all the damaged books for sale at a heavily discounted price in front side of our store. The state government did not give us any funds as relief, but helped us by standing as guarantor for the bank loan, which we took to rebuild the bookstore.

Our shop was selected for assistance under the Chief Minister's Relief Fund, but my father never followed up for the funds. We reopened a newly furbished IBS bookstore on August 15 the same year and slowly my father built the business again.


I remember that prior to the floods there was heavy rain for four days and we had heard that some repair work was being carried out on the dam. In the process something went wrong and the dam burst. Till now nobody knows what really went wrong.
I read in the papers in the following days that around 1,000 people died, but it's a wild estimate. Nobody knows the real number.


(The writer is proprietor, International Book Service, Deccan Gymkhana, Pune)

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