India has witnessed severe flooding and water logging in its cities this year all over again. Be it maximum city Mumbai or tech city of Bengaluru or Gurugram — all suffered flash floods that rendered extensive damages to houses while throwing public life out of gear at a time when government appeared almost like a mute spectator, in most cases. So, it's natural to think – why do Indian cities flood, year after year? Is this due to sporadic heavy rains or an urban planning failure?
“Urban flooding is merely a symptom of the greater malaise of the corruption pyramid that has become the main focus of both our elected government and employed administrators. Garbage is dumped in ancient drainage networks, blocking their natural storm drainage. Illegal constructions taking place along rivers within urban flood plains”, says Christopher C Benninger, founder, School of Planning at CEPT University, Ahmedabad.
Therefore, despite the predictable nature of the heavy monsoons, urban flooding has been routinely bringing cities to a standstill and there doesn’t seem to be any respite for its citizens. Amogh Gupta, Chairperson, School of Planning & Architecture (SPA)-New Delhi, echoes the same sentiment.
"The bureaucratic loopholes make it difficult for town planners to replicate what they learn in colleges, into practicality,” Gupta bemoans. It’s not that there is a dearth of good urban planners. According to him, the Master of Architecture (Urban Design) is the most sought-after course among students at SPA. Yet cities, old or new, experience the same problems every year. Gurugram, for instance, is a fairly young city, unlike many others, especially Mumbai. Meaning, city planners, architects and the government had the time to fix the changing urbanisation-related problems. Despite that, both Mumbai and Gurugram bear the brunt of the deluge annually, Gupta added.
Another contributing factor is the cities’ water drainage systems. “They’re considered a low priority in our cities,” veteran environment journalist Nitin Sethi says, adding that we don’t invest in building any new artificial systems, which lead to flooding in many urban areas even with minimal rainfall. Benninger concurs with the same view and adds that cities have not employed qualified urban planners to design the storm water drainage and city-wide water management systems.
If we are in the age of ‘smart cities’, we need to address why people are losing their lives to floods. In Benninger’s view, cities are being paved over, cemented over and the natural soil absorption is getting blocked causing rain water to collect on surfaces draining horizontally in search of drainage routes, that don’t exist anymore! Much as it would sound cliched, flooding has become the ‘new normal’.
So, are cities being planned futuristically? Gupta doesn’t think so. "We need cities that are water-smart. We need ‘sponge cities’ – cities structured to absorb and capture rainwater and utilise it to reduce floods," tells Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network for Dams, Rivers & People (SANDRP). World over, Berlin and China, among others, are using this concept to manage floods effectively. If cities will have roads built of cement-concrete, where will the water go? Rainwater in this case, gets neither absorbed, nor recharged, Thakkar, a former IITian adds.
The issue doesn’t seem to be about lack of preparedness either. Under the newly created Ministry of Jal Shakti’s Department Of Water Resources, a ‘Flood Management Programme’ (FMP) has been launched to provide financial assistance to state governments for undertaking flood management works. As per the ministry’s website, one of its many functions include flood forecasting, provision of central assistance and preparation of flood control, master plans for rivers Ganga and Brahmaputra. Despite these preparations, this year again, we all saw the Brahmaputra breaching its danger mark, as if there were no warning signals.
For decades, India is seeing people, both from the hinterlands and the cities, having to almost swim to reach places. As of 6th August, 888 deaths were reported in India owing to floods, according to database company Statista. When one looks around and sees the country’s alarming COVID numbers, this figure may look small. But it’s not. Floods have killed 109,412 people in the past 65 years and caused a loss of 4.69 lakh crore in six decades, points out a report by environment magazine Down To Earth.
Benninger tells CNBC-TV18, that the way out is to "rid our cities of career bureaucrats, and instead have our cities’ administrations directed by professionally trained city managers, and operated by staff promoted on merit instead of age and palm greasing". Professional management consultancy firms with top qualified staff should be engaged to carry out urban planning, regulation and infrastructural management processes, the American-Indian planner suggests.
Are there any policy-level changes needed so that cities can avoid water-logging? Sethi believes that city plans must incorporate a 20-30-year fair (neither extreme nor conservative) projection of the drainage capacity that would be required as the climate gets more erratic. Development plans must strictly incorporate these when fresh urbanisation activities are undertaken, he adds.
To make way for the increasing number of people who are dreaming of settling in big cities, we are felling trees, encroaching lands, mountains and forests and neglecting the importance of proper drainage systems, making cities more prone to the irregular and extreme patterns of rainfall. Is this what development is about? Perhaps no.
