India Keeps Flooding and Planners Won’t Stop It

Poor planning has led to a never ending cycle of floods in India.

The one time the police are as helpless as everyone else in Gurgaon

Indian cities come to a standstill every monsoon. Man-made factors created by rapid urbanization coupled with a lack of city and environmental planning reduce the disaster resilience of these Indian cities. Climate change brings on more intense Monsoons and India is contributing to the problem. India is a top emitter of greenhouse gasses emissions that generate erratic rainfall patterns in the monsoon, thereby creating a cyclical problem. Planners need to provide nature-based solutions and enforce environmental standards to fix it.

Historically, Indian cities never had drainage problems due to the abundance of natural drains and water bodies in various parts of the city. However, due to the rapid urbanization and expansion, these drainage systems have become increasingly compromised. Today, India has 39 cities that have more than 1 million inhabitants and 388 cities that have more than 100,000 inhabitants according to the World Population Review. In the last 10 years, the urban population in India has grown from 391 million to 493 million people.

The occurrence of urban floods has also shown a similar trajectory, with an increase in urban flooding incidents in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Calcutta, Chennai, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad- all with populations more than 5 million people. It notably began in 2005 with the Mumbai floods where thousands died and hundreds of thousands were left homeless; this has recurred annually across the country and left cities in shambles according to the National Disaster Management Authority. These floods also cause devastation in lost property, business standstills, forest uprooting, blackouts, and water, housing and food insecurities. Given that India’s urban population will nearly double by 2050 to 877 million, the urban flooding problem has immense implications for the future.

Most of the problem is man-made and planners have not kept up. The major cause and origin of these urban floods has been the rapid urbanization in India and city infrastructure not being able to keep up with its pace. As the urban population kept increasing, so did cities’ boundaries. Urban forests and perennial water bodies were swallowed up over time by private developers who continually expanded the built up environment beyond the confines of the original city. The problem is particularly visible in Bangalore, where the built up area now covers 86% of the region compared to around 40% 20 years ago.

All that concrete limits green spaces and natural drainage channels, reducing the water-holding capacity of cities. Urban expansion was aggravated by large-scale illegal settlements that encroached upon water bodies and forests as local governments failed to enact and enforce regulations to protect these areas. The affordable urban housing shortage also aggravated these issues as the migrants were left with no other options. In Bangalore itself, it has affected nearly 200 natural lakes and a canal network that connected these water systems, limiting the drainage system’s capacity to absorb and siphon off water. The existing environmental infrastructure lacks protection due to a lack of formal planning standards which leads to a lack of enforcement by local authorities. The private developers take over low-lying areas that form the natural drainage systems in the city and this exacerbates the urban flooding problem tenfold.

As cities expand beyond their original limits, the sewage system does not expand at the same pace. The increased wastewater from sewage systems is discharged into the few stormwater drains and rivers that still do exist with the consequence that the sewage mixes with the stormwater during monsoons and floods the city. Drains are either undersized or non-existent because of the low priority given to them by city planning departments, with preference given to overground “visible” structures that cannot handle the load of the monsoon and are more prone to overflow onto surface roads. The lack of a proper waste disposal system in cities also results in these drains being severely choked by indiscriminate dumping of waste and construction debris, limiting their already reduced capacity further.

The consequences of urban flooding are immense, both jarringly visible loss of life and more insidious after effects of displacement and homelessness. The urban poor and migrant laborers in Indian cities bear the brunt of this risk. They move from their hometowns in the rural hinterlands in search of occupation but are only able to work as low income daily wage earners in jobs like domestic workers, cleaners, taxi drivers, etc. They usually live in informal temporary settlements in underdeveloped areas that suffer from a lack of sanitation, clean water, formal housing, road networks, electricity and sewage. During floods, these settlements are washed away. Those that survive see their losses compounded, losing out on the incomes they could have earned from their daily wage jobs as the city comes to a standstill and they are unable to go to work. But with job centers moving to cities and a lack of affordable housing for new migrants, these settlements expand beyond their original boundaries and are built and rebuilt after each flood.

Urban floods also derail the economy in the short and long term. Cars and houses get submerged during floods and the private costs of replacing these takes years to recover. Millions of dollars of taxpayer money is used to fix public infrastructure and pump the stormwater out from the flood centers. In the state of Kerala alone in 2018, where majority of the flooding took place in urban and semi-urban areas, the World Bank and Asian Development estimate that the recovery cost on housing, infrastructure, utilities, livelihoods, health, environment, and cultural heritage  is approximately US$ 3.5 billion, just for the priority sectors. Apart from this, business comes to a standstill, resulting in a loss of faith in city infrastructure. This has turned away potential investors and has cost the Indian economy greatly in the long term.

This however is not just an Indian issue- Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, etc also face the same urban flooding problem. South Asian cities that faced an urban population boom post independence and economic liberalization have not been able to increase their capacity at the same pace. The lack of expenditure on expansive drainage and enforcement of environmental standards will continue to leave these cities in a vicious cycle. The increased emissions from urban areas will also speed up this flood cycle as rainfall will continue to be erratic due to climate change. The way forward is one that is led by nature-based solutions and environmental planning standards that regulate and manage the city effectively. These solutions can come in the form of revitalizing stormwater drains, increasing green cover, creating detention/holding ponds, and improving catchment areas connected to roads. Urban flooding requires our attention year-round, not just in the monsoon season.

You can reach the author of this piece, Ritwick Dutta, at: rd3203@nyu.edu 

You can reach the editor of this piece, Patrick Spauster, at: ps4375@nyu.edu