Every year, it’s the same old story of cities being flooded. When will Governments learn?

There are some images of the monsoon seared into our minds in India. The classic one is, of course, of a Delhi Transport Corporation bus stuck under the Minto Bridge. A relatively newer one is that of the flooded underpasses of “Millennium City” Gurugram. Those underpasses — coupled with the gleaming steel and glass towers of Cyber City and DLF Phase 5 that have allowed ad-filmmakers to ditch the roads of Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur and shoot their adverts in Gurugram — give the city a modern touch. But whenever there is a little more than average rainfall, everything goes out of whack. This time, the abiding image of the Gurugram floods was of a white Hyundai Verna almost submerged in a brown river that runs down Gurugram’s Golf Course Road, home of some of the most expensive real estate and fanciest apartments in India.

But it isn’t just about Gurugram or Delhi. Even Mumbai has been waylaid by the monsoon as it is every year. This year, the story of cancelled suburban train services has been missed, thanks to the reduced services due to the spread of the Wuhan virus. Unexpectedly in Jaipur, the iconic “Pink City” area has been in waist deep water. The same visual gets repeated in other major Indian cities up and down the country. It is an old story because it gets repeated every single monsoon season. Yes, occasionally the amount of rain can be overwhelming, just like it was 15 years ago in Mumbai. No city, no matter how well-prepared, can handle that quantity of rain. What we do know is that every year, there will be a few days of intense rainfall. We should be better prepared. To be fair, the authorities in Gurugram did manage to pump out vast amounts of water in a short span of time and opened the roads, too. But submerged cars will do no favour to its aspirational image. Questions should rightly be asked. Was planning sacrificed at the altar of making money? Why was the drainage system not planned properly? In other cities, through a vicious mix of corruption and incompetence, we have allowed haphazard development that has destroyed natural drainage channels. We have built no replacements. Yes, the rains are intense and yes, every year some images of floods and human tragedy will emerge from one corner of India or another but much of it is avoidable with better planning and infrastructure development. If we do not want the same old story, we don’t do something about it.