That sinking feeling: Why urban India gets flooded every monsoon

Over the years, rains have made Delhi’s Minto Road underpass, Mumbai’s Gandhi market near the King Circle and Chennai’s northern suburbs quite famous.

Mumbai won’t forget the 2005 flood anytime soon, as over 1,000 people had lost their lives. Nearly two decades later, the ‘Maximum City’ still comes to a grinding halt when it rains. Earlier this month parts of the city were inundated in waist-deep water.

And it is not just India's financial capital. Majority of urban areas lack effective storm water drainage. Add to that unplanned development, encroachment of natural drainage corridors, and climate change and it becomes a perfect storm. 

And the economic impact of flooding is also damaging. Mumbai lost Rs 14,000 crore to floods due to heavy rainfall between 2005 and 2015. The Brihanmumbai StormWater Disposal System, or BRIMSTOWAD, project to overhaul the city’s old storm water drainage system was proposed after the 1985 floods. However, work finally started after the 2005 deluge.  

The project, which included building eight major pumping stations, was yet to be completed as of January this year. Till that point, only six pumping stations had been built. The Brimstowad project was to cost Rs 616.30 crore when it was proposed in 1991. It was meant to be completed in 12 years. As of April 2021, Rs 2,439.35 crore had been spent on it and an additional investment of Rs 2,700 crore was still needed.

Let us move on to the national capital. Delhi’s first Drainage Master Plan was prepared in 1976. Even in 2022, the capital is still operating on the same plan. The Delhi government has been trying to put in place a new plan for years now. In December last year, the state government decided to engage consultants to solve the problem after finding that the plan prepared by IIT Delhi had no actionable points.

The Public Works Department was supposed to start the tendering process for consultants by January and have them engaged by March. However, as of July this year, there was no indication that a consultancy had been appointed. Even if the PWD had stuck to its original time frame, a national daily had said that the drainage master plan would be prepared only by March 2023. Delhi's drainage system would be redeveloped by 2025.  

In October last year, a Comptroller and Auditor General report had highlighted that the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, or BBMP, had not removed 714 encroachments out of the 2,626 identified near water bodies. Of the 23 significant encroachments, 16 were not even on BBMP’s list. 

Also, the IT capital’s storm water drains were not directly connected to its water bodies. In some places, the runoff water was flowing into constructed deviation canals. CAG found that this increased the chances of flash floods.

Storm drains in many Indian cities were designed for a rainfall intensity of 12–20 mm per hour, which is insufficient for the current rainfall standards. They will have to be replaced or retrofitted. This will require funding.

Managing water logging falls to the states and UTs and is one of the functions of their urban local bodies. An RBI analysis of 2017-18 data of 221 municipal bodies across India found that nearly half the bodies were under high fiscal stress, given their limited ability to raise own revenues.

Another recent central bank study found that 70 per cent of surveyed urban local bodies had seen a worsening in revenues and an increase in expenditure during the pandemic. Thus, there is a question mark on how quickly India can build up its urban stormwater infrastructure.

But some progress has been made. Till April this year, under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, states and Union Territories had taken up 799 projects worth 2,952 crore rupees for the elimination of 3,770 water-logging points. And out of that, April, 633 projects worth 1,180 crore rupees had been completed, which had resulted in the elimination of 2,300 water-logging points.

A June 2020 Ministry of Earth Sciences climate change assessment report had noted how the increased frequencies of heavy rainfall had enhanced flood risk all over India, particularly in urban areas. This requires an urgent fix. Also the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs should start  maintaining data on economic loss and deaths due to waterlogging to help us assess the overall damage.