Caught in the deluge: Flooding in India’s ill-equipped cities

As flood resilience drops in India’s cities, urbanists call for a policy shift that allows greater preparedness and adoption of blue-green solutions.

There is not much romance left for the rain in India’s cities. When an elderly couple in Mumbai recently recreated the classic Rim jhim gire sawan from Manzil (1979) in a video that went viral, the viewer response was largely marked by nostalgia for a different, “simpler” time. The country’s burgeoning urban spaces are becoming increasingly vulnerable to floods and their trail of distress – snapped power lines, accidents, drowning cars and death in waterlogged underpasses.

Experts and urban planners have emphatically identified unchecked development and changing weather patterns as the major triggers of urban flooding in India. The preparedness, however, has not kept pace, either with these climate variations or the rate at which the urban population is rising in India; it will be 43.2 per cent by 2035, according to the United Nations.

Last week, water levels in the Yamuna river rose to an all-time high, flooding several areas in Delhi. Earlier this month, floods hit Mumbai, in what has become an annual monsoon event here and in cities like Ahmedabad and Gurugram.

Also Read | Swollen Yamuna recedes slowly, concerns remain amid rain forecast in Delhi

A report by the Comptroller and Auditor General said the 2015 floods in Chennai, which left 289 people dead, were caused by “heavy rains coupled with multiple failures on the part of various government agencies”. It censured the state government for ineffective handling of encroachments that hampered flood mitigation work.

In 2022, Bengaluru received excessive rainfall – 132 mm on September 5, about 10 per cent of the seasonal rainfall in one day – that inundated many parts of the city. The impact of an unusual weather event was aggravated by poor in-built resilience, a cumulative result of inept planning over decades.

The cities are in “a tough place”, as they grapple with the twin challenges of having to accommodate a rising population as well as meet its demand for physical infrastructure which, in turn, is leaving them unprepared for weather events, even normal rainfall, says eminent climate scientist Prof J Srinivasan. “In Bengaluru, even if it rains 50 mm, there is flooding. You cannot always blame the monsoon. Our urban areas have not been managed properly. The inescapable fact is that our population has gone up and there are new demands,” says the Distinguished Professor at the Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science.

The challenge gets more complex with aberrant climate patterns.

Also Read | Heavy rains in Mumbai after week-long lull; waterlogging at few places

As another round of monsoon rain derails life in many towns and cities in northern India, urbanists reiterate the need for comprehensive strategies to make India’s cities more flood-resilient. The argument is for replacing the refrain of fatalism – “we can plan only so much for nature” – with one of resolve and inventiveness, to address what is essentially a man-made problem. The shift has to run on policies that encourage innovation and are complemented with solutions outside of the traditional grey infrastructure which constitutes human-engineered systems like stormwater drains and pipelines. They also underline a new approach to post-flooding assessment that goes beyond mere stock-taking of damages and helps devise long-term contingency plans.

The cycle of disruptions set off by urbanisation leads up to floods in familiar patterns, across India’s cities. A rise in population means a loss of natural infrastructure, shrinking water bodies, construction in low-lying, vulnerable areas, and encroachment of already brimming, poorly-maintained drains. More roads and pavements mean limited percolation of rainwater and as a result, increased stormwater runoff.

Urban planning now involves greater engagement with science. The gap between know-how and implementation on the ground, however, is in the overlapping of responsibilities taken up by different government agencies and the resultant lack of collective accountability. Individual domains like land development, roads and water supply are serviced by multiple agencies, leaving no one accountable for the overall delivery of the service, especially in the metros.

Owning up, locally

The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has been promoting the use of information and communication technology, by introducing the Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) for centralised management of urban infrastructure to help cities make evidence-based decisions.

“Currently, 75 cities have an operational ICCC for various municipal services including water supply and flood monitoring,” says R Srinivas, who has led the Metropolitan and Union Territories division of the Town and Country Planning Organisation under MoHUA.

Urban Local Bodies (ULBs), meanwhile, are struggling without fiscal autonomy to meet the evolving infrastructure challenges. Abhinav M, an urban planner and researcher in water and sanitation, green infrastructure, and psychological well-being, highlights the issue of different stakeholders undertaking programmes that have common water-resilience objectives – lake development authorities, corporations and municipalities, water supply bodies, pollution control boards and other state agencies. He sees structural, policy-level changes as critical for building resilient cities.

“Decentralisation and devolution of powers to the ULBs is the way forward. These agencies are more connected to the community but it is the government that retains the power to decide on local planning. The ULBs should be financially empowered (to independently envision and undertake projects),” says Abhinav, Senior Associate, Urban Practitioners Programme (UPP) at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS).

The UPP collaborates with public sector functionaries in key institutions for training in urban water supply and sanitation, geospatial technology, building resilience to climate change and disaster risk reduction.

The United States Trade and Development Agency and KPMG estimate that flooding caused by heavy rains between 2005 and 2015 cost Mumbai Rs 14,000 crore. In Bengaluru, the Outer Ring Road Companies Association estimated a collective loss of Rs 225 crore for companies located on the road, from one day of heavy rainfall last year – August 30.

A national survey by LocalCircles, the results of which were released this month, had 58 per cent of the respondents say that their city/district gets “quite badly waterlogged” during the monsoon season and 36 per cent say that they were “somewhat affected” by the waterlogging. The survey received a total of about 22,000 responses from citizens in 293 districts; 48 per cent of the respondents were from tier 1, 33 per cent from tier 2, and 19 per cent from tier 3 and 4 districts.

Among the respondents impacted by waterlogging, 84 per cent indicated that they spent “much more time” in traffic and 64 per cent said they lost work hours/productivity. The respondents also confirmed vehicle wear and tear and related costs (68 per cent) and increased risk of accidents (68 per cent).

New shades of growth

“There cannot be an absolute dependence on engineered grey solutions. These are expensive and, on their own, are likely to fail in the face of intense rainfall events. Combining these with the blue-green solutions (to develop parks, wetlands, green roofs, and permeable surfaces) will make mitigation strategies more flexible,” says Sahana Goswami, Senior Programme Manager – Water Resilience, at World Resources Institute (WRI) India.

Blue-green infrastructure is a complementary network of water bodies like rivers and canals, and green components like parks and forests, designed to improve urban flood resilience.

In a WRI India working paper published in January this year, Goswami, along with Samrat Basak, Aakash Malik and Raj Bhagat Palanichamy studied the relationship between built-up expansion in 10 cities from 2000 to 2015 and the changes it brought to their blue-green infrastructure, such as surface water, green cover, and recharge zones.

Remote sensing data and satellite imagery were used to track the changes. The study said significant parts of new development in most of these cities were sited on high and very high recharge potential zones – Delhi (66 per cent), Bengaluru (64 per cent), Kolkata (54 per cent), Chennai (49 per cent), Surat (45 per cent), Ahmedabad (41 per cent), Jaipur (15 per cent), Hyderabad (14 per cent), Pune (14 per cent), and Mumbai (11 per cent).

Systemic issues, protracted administrative processes and the complex economics of land development have limited the range of solutions. Goswami says no system in place allows innovation in identifying solutions. “For the city authorities, there is no incentive to try out innovation at scale,” she says.

Unchecked development is also linked with the absence of the right incentives. “The planning authorities who design their cities’ master plans should be working with ideas to ensure integrated, holistic development but they are, instead, incentivised for sprawl. The private players are also focused on development outside of the core city areas where infrastructure, including water supply, is a problem,” says Abhinav.

The undermining of the people’s agency is a larger issue. Here, Abhinav distinguishes between the accountability of mayors in some cities in the West, directly elected by the people for a fixed tenure, and that of mayors in India, who do not wield the powers of state-appointed Municipal Commissioners.

Srinivas says it is time cities developed technology-powered resilience and preparedness for flooding. “Municipal corporations need to prepare GIS (Geographic Information System)-based master plans, which can accordingly delineate areas vulnerable to urban flooding,” says Srinivas.

Cities also need to prepare their respective disaster management plans, he adds. “These should focus on pre-disaster preparations so that infrastructure like stormwater drains, sewer lines and roads can be protected and the damage can be reduced to the minimum.”

Solutions from nature

In cities where the adoption of basic sustainable practices like rainwater harvesting has not caught on, nature-based solutions have started to find the administrators’ endorsement.

The Delhi Development Authority’s Master Plan 2041, for instance, has the enhancement of blue-green infrastructure as a priority area. The strategy covers the development of green buffers along drains, repurposing of landfills, underutilised sites and wastelands, incentivising green roofs, and greening of streets and spaces under flyovers.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s Mumbai Climate Action Plan incorporates strategies towards a Net Zero and climate-resilient Mumbai by 2050.

Abhinav says this is a good time to start talking about green solutions but these are also, essentially, western concepts that need to be tailored for Indian cities.

The project tendering system in India’s cities is skewed towards the adoption of grey infrastructure, points out Goswami. “A shift to solutions like bioswales (vegetated channels that move stormwater runoff) or rain gardens is yet to happen,” she says.

Mitigation strategies have been limited either to piecemeal projects for the monsoon months or larger, resource-intensive programmes that are invariably delayed. There is change in the making, with more urban planning bodies taking water-sensitive approaches in line with climate action, but these solutions are, still, in the early stages of adoption.