Ik Din Ayega, oh yes the day will come but before that let us hope that we will not have to deal with more of the kind of Jal, the cyclone storm that just plagued Chennai for the whole of this Sunday, because invariably the city planners of Chennai did very little to help the growing city adapt to deal with some, if not all of the natural hazards this part of the world is increasingly becoming prone to.

Yes, your thoughts quite like mine might be drifting towards the Bheegi Yaadein of the Mumbai incident. No No, not that one but of the 26/7, that’s right the floods of 2005.

The incident was a simple one, heavy (994mm) incessant (for 24hr) rain plagued Mumabi on the 26^th and the 27^th of July; and world the witnessed the plight of the suffering Mumbai residents.

Roughly 22% of the land was flooded. All roads where flooded, rail was non-operational, airport closed down for 2 days and thus the transportation infrastructure ceased to be useful. Telephones (wired and mobile) stopped working the public address system was never effective and the people were effectively cutoff from the rest of the world. Some of the power stations were flooded and a few of the power lines were broken. With the effect Mumbai was dark, deaf and stuck. The situation undoubtedly complicated as hours passed by, no food reached the people and there was this growing concern of an epidemic, given the fact that the sewerage has merged with flood water.

So, let us try and see what went wrong.

First we ought to look at the rain itself. Was the rain on this spiteful day any different form the rain jo Mumbai ko Adaat hai? Well, technically this was a rain of a different kind as this was the 8^th highest 24hr period recorded rain ever. The next; could the MET department have told us about the coming rain, at least in theory? Well perhaps. But then the important question is would the few hours’ notice be of any use? Or in other words does Mumbai’s century old storm water drainage system have, at least in paper, the needed capacity to deal with the effuse of this kind? The answer is No, its design capacity is about 25mm drainage per hour (it rained hard, 994mm in 24hrs).

Wonderful, now that things have cleared up, was the authorities in charge aware of this impending danger? Undoubtedly yes. In fact there was this McKinsey report that brought to daylight the steps to be taken to turn Mumbai into Shanghai where this small but exceedingly relevant issue of the need for expanding the drainage capacity was pointed out. In addition Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation had commissioned a UK based firm in 1990 to look into this issue and a project a INR 600 crore project was proposed and soon scrapped(in the name of cost of course;Note direct flood damage ran into abut INR 450 crores)

Beautiful, now that we have successfully convicted the lack of infrastructure for the case of flood, lets us try and see what the infrastructure ‘development’ has actually got to do with the whole issue.

The starting is clear, the development happened and hence the demand for drainage increased to the extent that 40% of the sewerage was carried through the drainage network; slums are one of the reasons for this. The second; limited maintenance of the system; in part attributed to new development ‘on drains’, plastics and other waste clogging the drains and so on. The unplanned development of Northern Mumbai is the third and most important reason. The last but definitely not the final, of the clearing of the mangroves and the swamps which served to ‘buffer’ the effect of floods in the past. Up to 40% of Mumbai’s swamps were lost from 1995 to 2005 to builders and slums; and the effect is clear.

So the take away is that there is a lot to be done to help our existing cities cope with natural disasters and some meticulous planning should go into cities that we hope to develop in the future. For Chennai, may Jal be the vaccine will wake the authorities to reality; setting the ball rolling for the development of the needed immunity not just against flood but against all natural disasters! So let the music begin!