Editorial: Development Is Playing With Our Lives

The Army was called out in Pune this week not to quell disturbances but for rescue operations to assist the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) as the city straddling the Western Ghats saw relentless rainfall that caused widespread devastation, disruption, and chaos. Pune recorded the third-highest rainfall in July on Thursday with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) reporting a staggering 114.1 mm in a day. Neighbouring hill stations of Lonavala and Lavasa recorded 300 mm and 417mm respectively. Four people died in Pune and the usual problems played out — waterlogged areas, confused signals from authorities, scrambling residents, shuttered shops and educational institutions, widespread losses and more.

Pune was not the only city laid low by heavy rainfall and resulting floods; cities in Assam have been dealing with floods for most of this year’s monsoon, Mumbai and New Delhi did, Surat and Bharuch in Gujarat did. Devastating flood incidents were recorded in Hyderabad in 2020 and 2021, in Chennai in November 2021, in Bengaluru and Ahmedabad in 2022, in parts of Delhi in July 2023 and May this year, and Nagpur in September last year. Virtually no city or town has been free of disruptions and devastation brought about by heavy to very heavy rainfall. People perish, lives are torn asunder, and economic losses worth thousands of crores are recorded every year due to urban floods — as important as flooding in rural areas though of a different nature.

Yet, the story simply repeats every year in different cities. The forecasting systems and their reliability have considerably improved over the years, the flow of information to people as early warnings is better than it used to be on say July 26, 2005, when Mumbai was hit by a cloudburst bringing a staggering 944 mm of rainfall in a day, and the capability of official response systems have enhanced. However, why India’s cities are repeatedly going under appears to have few answers. This is not the case. It is not an incomprehensible problem at all. The writing has been on the wall for at least a decade now: the steady destruction of natural areas in and around cities resulting in an erosion of ecological defences to heavy or super-heavy rainfall. For those who have spent years in the domain, the ecological connection between heavy rainfall – worsened by climate change impacts – and extreme inundation in cities is crystal clear. But governments, both at the centre and in states who determine the planning and development of cities, pretend to not comprehend the link between the two.

In every city that has been battered by heavy rainfall and floods in recent years, including Pune, the trail goes back to the denudation of natural areas — specifically its green areas, forests, tree cover, rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks, bays — in the name of development. This ‘development’ is not a holistic progress or advance of urban life but a euphemism for more and more construction. Cities have registered an unbridled expansion with construction and concretisation replacing the natural blue-green areas. Where should the rainwater go if not come flooding into the streets and homes and shops? The response has been a slew of engineering-led or technological interventions such as water pumps to throw out the water but these are futile. The response has to be ecological, based on a deep understanding of how natural systems work and how much can be exploited in the name of development.

Mumbai’s Mithi River or any of the other three — Dahisar, Oshiwara, Poisar — as the Yamuna in Delhi or Ennore in Chennai have shown what it means when the floodplains of rivers are considered as mere land for construction. Bengaluru’s lake areas have shown this too during heavy rains in the last two years. These spaces belonged to the water, floodplains were where the water was held when the river swelled and overflowed; forests and green spaces were where rainwater soaked into the ground beneath, reducing the runoff into built areas of the city. On the one hand, the blue-green areas are diminished by development, while on the other, rainfall intensified and its patterns changed due to climate change. The response cannot be merely technological; it has to be ecological. Flood management and climate action plans without a holistic ecological perspective are limited — and bound to fail. It is time that governments and planners recognised that flooding is an outcome of delinking urban development from urban ecology.