Editorial: Let’s do it for a rain day

If the home of Amitabh Bachchan is flooded, as last month it was in Mumbai, mustn’t it surely count as proof that urban flooding (UF) is a serious enough problem now? In a VIP-ridden country, isn’t that a red enough alert for the administration to wake up and smell the water right under its nose?

Water, the great leveller, is increasingly becoming impudent. Just as last month’s rains in Mumbai were rude enough to flood the gates of popular film stars, the Yamuna’s overflow dared to lap the toes of politicians Shashi Tharoor, Ram Gopal Yadav, and Atishi in June 2024. Three years ago, cars belonging to Bengaluru billionaires were subjected to the effortless levity of floodwaters from the Bellandur and Yemalur lakes.

What used to be the familiar rigmarole of low-income and low-lying areas being inundated is now being surpassed every year, not respecting income, status and power demography. UF, as a phenomenon, has this year spread to central business districts and tier-2 cities with impunity. With a few weeks to go for the monsoon to spend itself, at least 13 cities have witnessed its devastation: Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kochi—all UF regulars—Kolkata, Patna, Guwahati, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Srinagar, Surat, newcomers to the class.

While apparently disparate, these occurrences share common causes—which too has become a rigmarole: High-intensity monsoon rainfall in volumes greater than what the city infrastructure was designed for; unplanned urban growth with rampant concretisation and encroachment of waterbodies, leading to rapid runoff; outdated drainage systems clogged up due to dysfunctional waste disposal systems; reduction of open spaces due to real estate development. So de rigueur has this story become that it’s no longer a wow fact that 800 mm of excess rain can lay low an entire city like Mumbai. Floods are no longer portentous events during the dread months of July-August in Bengaluru and Hyderabad; they are certainties.

The occurrence of flooding even in satellite cities like Gurugram, built to ease congestion in urban agglomerations, exposes the scant regard town planners pay to UF imperatives despite the experience of metro deluges being available to them. Gurugram’s expansion disrupted natural runoff channels from the Aravalli Hills and filled up its waterbodies with residential developments. Where would the water go but the streets.

It's no longer enough to respond to UF events with the usual disaster protocols of sending SMS alerts, setting up emergency helplines (which often cannot), and calling in the NDRF. In fact, civic bulletins must be year-round and day-long and disaster response teams must be stationed in-house in every subsector. It’s time to take a preventive approach to UF as has been successfully done in several cities around the world. We could start with developing a flood‐probability index for each locality and provision those that are vulnerable with proper resources and personnel. We could adopt the sponge city urban design adopted in China that absorbs and retains rainwater. We could reclaim lost waterbodies on a war footing, as is being done in Hyderabad. Through multiple municipal micro actions, we could carve out spaces for small parks and ponds within each community as receptacles for runoff; we could crack down on unnecessary concretisation; we could take up upstream rivershed management to slow down runoff and give more room to rivers, as done in the Netherlands. It’s time to do more than the usual.