Every edition of torrential rain in this city floods us with the same stories — snaking traffic in which people are stuck on roads for two to four hours, suburban train services disrupted, cars and railway tracks going under water, students unable to get home and frantic parents worrying, water levels rising on streets turning them into rivers, cabs and rickshaws refusing rides or quoting unrealistic fares, water entering homes and shops in low-lying areas and more. This is why the headline “Shame Old Story” in this newspaper on Thursday morning hit home for so many of us.
The story is really old and it is, indeed, a matter of shame for the authorities in Mumbai that people must suffer the same trials year after year, one downpour after another, on their watch. Or, perhaps, it is not shameful for them because officials always offer the excuse that it rained too heavy for the water to be drained out to the sea and, therefore, flooding was inevitable. And trot out rainfall data to convince us. We get convinced too. But heavy to super-heavy rainfall is only half the story.
The other half is that, despite a plethora of knowledge documents, action plans, seminars and meetings over just the past decade, Mumbai floods as if the city’s systems are clueless. Simple action and protocols are either not in place or not followed. This Wednesday, for example, when meteorologists, including the venerated Indian Meteorology Department, shared information of what the day could bring, all it required was for the city authorities to interpret the information and, without wasting time in officialese, send out adequate warnings and alerts to Mumbaikars on their mobile phones in time for people to take critical decisions about their movements.
Heavy Monsoon Rains Lash Mumbai: BMC Advises Caution For Next 24 Hours As Season’s Rain Tally Crosses 2500 mm Mark
If, for example, people had received alerts with even an hour or so to spare before the thunderstorm hit the city, there might have been fewer folks out on the streets altogether, at a time when the torrential rain slowed down all movement or made it impossible for vehicles and trains to ply. Companies might have toyed with the idea of closing down earlier in the evening and resorting to Work from Home for the rest of the work hours. School and colleges might have decided to call it a day sooner in the evening.
What would it take for the authorities to draft an alert and have it dropped, well in time, into every message inbox through all the service providers in the city? This does not require elaborate structures and large-scale preparations. What it calls for is a clear chain of command in which senior officers of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation decide what alerts to issue — not alarmist but information-based — in real time to as many people as possible. Mobile service providers can be pulled in to do the rest.
The approach to information management is crucial here and we have not seen this improve from one year to the next. Remember the BMC’s Covid-19 dashboard? The BMC only needs to recall the detailed information, data, and warnings it shared in real time and know that its systems are capable of doing it every monsoon. In the city’s flood management strategies and measures, information management is not accorded the importance it should be.
I had the opportunity to draw attention to this during a recent round-table discussion on Mumbai flooding, based on a paper written by a former IAS officer, ironically in the Bandra Kurla Complex which sees massive waterlogging and resulting traffic congestion with even a moderate downpour. The response was lukewarm; the criticality of letting millions know what to expect in the next few hours of rain did not, somehow, land hard.
That BKC sits on the city’s wetlands abutting the Mithi river is well known; it is bound to see flooding during heavy rainfall. Across Mumbai, a staggering 70% of wetlands were lost to construction in 44 years from 1970 to 2014, according to data from the Wetlands International South Asia (WISA). All cities in India did but none as much as Mumbai which has been “developed” with scant regard for its ecology and the carrying capacity of its rivers, seafronts, forests and hills.
Mumbai Weather Updates: Heavy Rainfall Alert Continues As City Resumes To Normalcy After Severe Disruptions, Waterlogging Overnight
Why information management during such calamities is more crucial than it appears is because we are seeing more frequent episodes of intense rainfall over a few hours. The highest rainfall spots on Wednesday evening got upto five times more rain between 5pm and 10pm than what the stormwater drains are equipped to handle — Mankhurd registered the highest at 276.2 mm, Andheri East around 191mm, Marol 176.2 mm, Sewri Koliwada nearly 148mm, and Wadala 146mm. Indeed, these are staggering amounts of precipitation and few cities around the world are designed to drain such rain. Other areas in Mumbai received considerably less than 100mm in the same duration.
We are seeing wide variations of rainfall on the same day — cities within the city. This calls for area-level or ward-level flood management because, clearly, one approach cannot address all here. Again, during the pandemic, the BMC had put in place the hub-and-spokes model in which every ward office had its own mini-war room which, in turn, was connected to and drawing resources from the central or main war room. This model had even lavish praise back then with even the international media commending it as the “Mumbai model” of containment. This approach deserves a look for flood management too.
Studies confirm that rainfall over Mumbai has been intensifying over the past few years and that intense rainfall in a short time will become more frequent. Parts of the city — sections of civic wards in the south, nearly 1000 buildings and 24 kilometres of road length — face submergence or subsidence by 2050; more than 35% of Mumbai’s population — one in every three — lives within 250 metres of chronic flooding spots known as “hotspots”, according to the city’s climate action plan.
It is clear that without proper information management and area-level flood management, it will be the same old story every time the skies open up. This needs to change.
Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and won the Laadli Media Award 2024 for her writing in this column
Mumbai Rains: BMC Orders High-level Inquiry After Woman Drowns In Open Rainwater Drain In Andheri East; Police File ADR