Editorial: Deluge of dysfunction
As guidelines issued by the National Disaster Management Authority make clear, urban and rural flooding are as different as chalk and cheese. Flood peaks in urban areas are 1.8-8 times higher compared to the levels seen in a rural context.
Visual from the spot
The least useful point to make about the death of three Civil Services Exam aspirants due to the flooding of a basement in New Delhi is that it wouldn’t have caught the nation’s attention had the victims been slum-dwellers or had it occurred in another city. Where a disaster has occurred and who its victims are influences the news cycle, and it’s true that the government is less sensitive to mishaps that occur away from the media glare. However, Saturday night’s tragedy in the basement of an exam coaching centre highlights the vastly under-acknowledged phenomenon of urban flooding, a recurrent visitation that just cannot be dismissed with the generic terms ‘heavy rain’ or ‘floods’ anymore.
As guidelines issued by the National Disaster Management Authority make clear, urban and rural flooding are as different as chalk and cheese. Flood peaks in urban areas are 1.8-8 times higher compared to the levels seen in a rural context. Flood volumes are six times greater and runoff in our paved cities can be incredibly fast. Consequently, flooding takes place in a matter of minutes, too fast for any disaster response agency, let alone under-equipped and under-trained municipal ‘Emergency Cells’. It is futile therefore to see urban flooding as a disaster response issue. We would do better if we adopted a disaster planning and policy design approach.
The flooding that claimed the lives of three students in Old Rajendra Nagar in New Delhi was not the result of an extended spell of heavy rain. It was the outcome of a predictable conspiracy of factors: the basement lay well below the street outside; the neighbourhood was flooded due to silted-up drainage; the basement was being used as a library rather than for parking; and a plethora of other major and micro dysfunctions that make our cities the nightmares that they are. These are near universal frailties in our cities, and it does not help to see incidents such as this only in the context of tardy response by relief agencies or criminal negligence by establishment owners. It’s far more useful to see the wider ecosystem of dysfunction and faulty urban design and respond to it with policy correctives.
Instead, what follows is fingerpointing, scapegoating and cosmetic blame-fixing combined with showy bulldozer action. That is what the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has engaged in, over the last two days: Arrests of the coaching centre staff, building owners and even an unfortunate fellow who drove through the flooded street in an SUV at that inopportune time. These are rather the actions of an administration hastening to cover up, deflect attention and put off the reckoning to another day.
Urban flooding disasters in India have increased in frequency since the August 2000 deluge in Hyderabad. Most of our big cities have experienced them: Ahmedabad (2001), Delhi (2002, 2003, 2009, 2010, 2015), Chennai (2004, 2015) Mumbai (2005, 2015), Surat (2006), Kolkata (2007), Jamshedpur (2008), and Guwahati (2010). In 2021, no less than 30 cities in South India were flooded. This year, a dozen cities including Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and Delhi have been affected, with the Army having to be called to the rescue in some cases. Why, errant waters even touched the toes of our MPs in Lutyens’ Delhi! Clearly, therefore, it’s time to act?
