What lessons can be learnt from city deluge of Mumbai and Nagpur
Friday - July 20, 2018 10:32 am ,
Category : WTN SPECIAL
WTN- Every monsoon brings in nightmares for city dwellers in India. Every bout of heavy rain inundates large parts of our cities and maroons thousands. The roads and lanes get deluged and potholes turn into caverns and craters. The drains start overflowing and so do the choked nullahs and sewer lines, spreading filth and giddiness on the roads and in homes. Vehicles honk frantically and bump into each other for space, taking eons to cover miniscule distances.
Everywhere there are miles long traffic jams that would never end and no contingent of traffic police seems adequate enough to ease up things. Everything goes haywire and life looks shattered. No one has a clue what to do and how to get back to normal. Chaos reigns supreme. If a foreigner visits any of our major cities during monsoons, it will seem the world war has just ended there. There is such a specter of helplessness, disaster and anarchy around that it feels safe and wise to keep ourselves locked up in our houses for a couple of months till the rains are over. Venturing out might prove deadly. Mumbai has already experienced such dance of death and destruction a couple of times.
People have died falling into open manholes. Negligence cannot be more brutal and complete. Any heavy rain drowns railway tracks and shuts airport runways. Surprisingly, this is a situation we are face to face with for decades and the policy makers have no idea how to improve things so that the next monsoons are better tackled. Be it Kolkata, be it Chennai, be it Hyderabad, Guwahati, Agartala or Delhi or Srinagar, every city is vulnerable to unmanageable water logging and unprecedented flash floods after every spell of heavy showers. But we don’t learn any lesson from these disastrous phases. Every major rain showdown accrues business losses worth millions.
Schools and colleges get shut and education is hit. Low attendance in government offices leads to huge loss of precious man hours and delays projects. Perhaps, the problem has gone out of our hands and there is not much we can do in any quick time. The cities have been allowed to grow so haphazardly and in such blatant violation of civic and environmental norms, that reversing the whole master plan is nigh impossible, When the basic fundamentals on which our cities have been built and designed are wrong and skewed, mishaps of all kinds are bound to happen. A city equipped to sustain a population of 10-15 lakhs have to house 30-40 lakh people.
Infrastructure has not been able to keep pace with the unprecedented population growth in the cities. Lack of development in villages forces people to flock to cities. Things have been systematically allowed to go out of hands. Had the civic authorities woken up three decades back, today we wound not have been in such a mess. City after city is today falling prey to rain mayhem just because of lack of proper planning, unbridled population growth, illegal constructions and encroachments, lack of proper drainage and water exit channels and their regular maintenance and cleaning and destruction of natural water bodies and green covers which could soak or channelise the excess water.
Every day a new colony is coming up in some corner of the city and there is no stringent checking of the facilities being sought by the colonisers or what is available to them and how the scarce resources will be affected or how much pressure on environment, ecosystem and the neighbouring civic infrastructure a new settlement will create. These basic checks and balances are not in place. Rules are all in papers; on the ground money plays the decider.
Civic negligence must be considered a criminal offence and the errant officials must get exemplary punishment for their dereliction. Apart from this, the only solution we have in hand is to establish smart cities around the extant urban agglomerations and plan those cities keeping in view the needs of a population 30-40 years ahead. Illegal constructions inside cities must be banished and drains and roads must be kept prepared beforehand to face the rains. The funds must be used efficiently with smart management as well as innovative engineering practices. Corruption has to be weeded out urgently if we want to get out of this shameful situation. If the nerve centers of the country’s economy, culture and politics get so crippled at a simple annual natural occurrence, that too in this age of stupendous technological excellence, we simply lose the right to dream big. We haven’t been able to set even our basic building blocks right, what to talk of mega edifices over them!
-Window To News
Everywhere there are miles long traffic jams that would never end and no contingent of traffic police seems adequate enough to ease up things. Everything goes haywire and life looks shattered. No one has a clue what to do and how to get back to normal. Chaos reigns supreme. If a foreigner visits any of our major cities during monsoons, it will seem the world war has just ended there. There is such a specter of helplessness, disaster and anarchy around that it feels safe and wise to keep ourselves locked up in our houses for a couple of months till the rains are over. Venturing out might prove deadly. Mumbai has already experienced such dance of death and destruction a couple of times.
People have died falling into open manholes. Negligence cannot be more brutal and complete. Any heavy rain drowns railway tracks and shuts airport runways. Surprisingly, this is a situation we are face to face with for decades and the policy makers have no idea how to improve things so that the next monsoons are better tackled. Be it Kolkata, be it Chennai, be it Hyderabad, Guwahati, Agartala or Delhi or Srinagar, every city is vulnerable to unmanageable water logging and unprecedented flash floods after every spell of heavy showers. But we don’t learn any lesson from these disastrous phases. Every major rain showdown accrues business losses worth millions.
Schools and colleges get shut and education is hit. Low attendance in government offices leads to huge loss of precious man hours and delays projects. Perhaps, the problem has gone out of our hands and there is not much we can do in any quick time. The cities have been allowed to grow so haphazardly and in such blatant violation of civic and environmental norms, that reversing the whole master plan is nigh impossible, When the basic fundamentals on which our cities have been built and designed are wrong and skewed, mishaps of all kinds are bound to happen. A city equipped to sustain a population of 10-15 lakhs have to house 30-40 lakh people.
Infrastructure has not been able to keep pace with the unprecedented population growth in the cities. Lack of development in villages forces people to flock to cities. Things have been systematically allowed to go out of hands. Had the civic authorities woken up three decades back, today we wound not have been in such a mess. City after city is today falling prey to rain mayhem just because of lack of proper planning, unbridled population growth, illegal constructions and encroachments, lack of proper drainage and water exit channels and their regular maintenance and cleaning and destruction of natural water bodies and green covers which could soak or channelise the excess water.
Every day a new colony is coming up in some corner of the city and there is no stringent checking of the facilities being sought by the colonisers or what is available to them and how the scarce resources will be affected or how much pressure on environment, ecosystem and the neighbouring civic infrastructure a new settlement will create. These basic checks and balances are not in place. Rules are all in papers; on the ground money plays the decider.
Civic negligence must be considered a criminal offence and the errant officials must get exemplary punishment for their dereliction. Apart from this, the only solution we have in hand is to establish smart cities around the extant urban agglomerations and plan those cities keeping in view the needs of a population 30-40 years ahead. Illegal constructions inside cities must be banished and drains and roads must be kept prepared beforehand to face the rains. The funds must be used efficiently with smart management as well as innovative engineering practices. Corruption has to be weeded out urgently if we want to get out of this shameful situation. If the nerve centers of the country’s economy, culture and politics get so crippled at a simple annual natural occurrence, that too in this age of stupendous technological excellence, we simply lose the right to dream big. We haven’t been able to set even our basic building blocks right, what to talk of mega edifices over them!
-Window To News
