Indian cities' inability in solving drainage-related problems have economic rather than engineering roots, writes Viswanathan Venkataraman as he shares the historical dimensions of this issue
The recent episodes of destructive flooding in cities such as Hyderabad and Bengaluru have once again turned the spotlight on the drainage problems facing urban India. According to a recent report by the New Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment titled Why Urban India Floods, flooding is one of the most predominant hazards facing urban India at present. Experts and commentators who have studied this issue have identified a number of vital causal dimensions to this problem ranging from unplanned urban development, which has led to the encroachment of the natural drainage channels of urban water bodies, to shortcomings in drainage infrastructures which have led to the intensification of the problem.
Missing in much of these discussions, however, are the historical dimensions of this issue. A perusal of these dimensions indicates two things: firstly, urban flooding and the inability of Indian cities to upgrade drainage infrastructures were, in a similar vein to contemporary times, features of urban life even in the British period; secondly, Indian cities’ inability in solving these problems in this period had economic rather than engineering roots. Even when comprehensive engineering solutions to these problems were available, at that time they were only haltingly implemented due to the inability of local municipal governments to finance such elaborate schemes on their own. Given that this weakness and institutional structure continues to largely endure in Indian cities, there is a need to provide secure financial backing to local governments for building robust urban infrastructure in the future.
The introduction of modern urban drainage systems in British India
Modern drainage systems were introduced in the major cities of the world from around 1850 onward as a response to emergent epidemic diseases such as Cholera. Indian cities were no exceptions to this trend as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras city (now Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai) — the three biggest cities in British India — were among the first to introduce these systems there. Kolkata (then Calcutta) introduced its system in 1858, while Mumbai (then Bombay) and Chennai (then Madras) introduced their systems in the late 1870s with the key responsibilities for financing, building, operating and maintaining these systems lay with the local municipal bodies.
The precise engineering arrangements for draining the cities varied from case to case and was shaped largely by local conditions. Design choice in this period revolved around two modes of drainage — the ‘combined’ and the ‘separate’ system of drainage. The ‘combined’ system transported both stormwater (surface run-off of rainwater) and sewage in a single underground sewer, while the ‘separate’ system collected and disposed storm water and sewage separately via separate pipes. While Kolkata opted for a ‘combined’ system due to its topography, Mumbai and Chennai city opted for the ‘separate’ system guided by the annual rainfall patterns in the city. Since rainfall in the latter two cities were restricted only to a few months in a year, it was felt that stormwater can be separately managed more efficiently. On a similar note, while Kolkata opted to drain its stormwater into a nearby tidal creek by the name Bidhyadhari, Chennai and Mumbai opted to drain their stormwater into the sea via open drains and channels.
Drainage systems in Practice
Following their introduction, these drainage systems certainly did not have a smooth career and began to develop a number of problems not so different from the drainage problems afflicting contemporary Indian cities. The nature of the problems in each case was strongly conditioned by its design choices. For instance, the cities that adopted the ‘separate’ system developed practical difficulties in keeping sewage from entering storm water drains and vice versa. This manifested in Mumbai in 1901 when parts of the city’s storm water drains had become a public health hazard when a slower uptake of household sewer connections led to the dumping of sewage into these drains. In Chennai city, in the late 1920s, the reverse was the problem as storm water found its way into sewage pipes thereby stretching the sewage disposal arrangements of the system.
While Kolkata’s ‘combined’ system could steer clear of the aforementioned difficulties, it still had to search for new disposal arrangements for its storm water due to the silting up and rise in the bed level of the Bidyadhari river by the mid-1910s thereby causing stagnation within the drains.
Furthermore, the carrying capacity of the stormwater drains in all of these cities were beginning to be overwhelmed resulting in monsoon floods through the 1920s and 1930s. For instance, a national newspaper report from August 1923 complained about Kolkata (then Calcutta) that ‘Floods are of daily occurrence, and it is doubtful if this will ever be a thing of the past’, while a report on flooding in Mumbai in 1937 noted that ‘Flooded Bombay (now Mumbai) streets, are a common sight...’ during monsoons. In both these cases, the inadequate capacity of its drainage infrastructure to respond to the rainfall patterns in the city were identified as the most important cause, thus providing us interesting parallels from the past on monsoon flooding in urban India.
Halting solutions
The city governments of that era were certainly not silent spectators as these problems started unraveling from of them. They were, as a matter of fact, quite alive to the need to upgrade their respective drainage systems. For instance, Mumbai city’s corporation had planned for a project costing nearly Rs 1.36 crore to give a comprehensive overhaul of the city’s storm water drainage system in 1924, while Kolkata had finalised a scheme to shift its outfall works from Bidyadhari river to the river Kulti by 1930. But financial stringency facing the local governments in this period meant these schemes were either delayed or suspended or only partially implemented.
While the implementation of Calcutta’s (now Kolkata) scheme could eventually commence only in 1935, Bombay’s (now Mumbai) scheme for stormwater drainage was not implemented even by 1933. Under the tight financial constraints, the municipal bodies could not go beyond tinkering with the existing system to prevent flooding. In Mumbai, the municipal corporation began to allow storm water to drain off through sewage pipes during periods of monsoon in a bid to reduce flooding of city streets in the 1930s.
This position of financial weakness of municipal bodies is succinctly captured by the following quote from O.J.Wilkinson, who served as the drainage engineer of Kolkata in the mid 1920. He noted that: ‘In Calcutta (now Kolkata) we have ... terrific rainstorms to contend with, a drainage problem of unparalleled complexity, a vast conservancy question..Yet the income per head of the population is but a fraction of London or other great European cities. Whereas in London, the rateable value is such that enormous schemes to meet the growing needs of the community can be financed without much difficulty from municipal funds, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), it is quite impossible for obvious reasons. The drainage question alone is of such decisive importance and so great in extent that the cost of remedial measures may be quite beyond the means of the corporation.’
If this was the case in Kolkata, one of the then richest municipal bodies in the country, then it would certainly not be difficult to fathom what the state of drainage systems in other poorer yet populous cities such as Lucknow and Banaras might have been. Indeed, as of 1937 only 3% of the 517 municipalities across the five provinces of Bengal, Mumbai, Chennai, UP and Punjab had modern sewage disposal systems installed even though the engineering practices behind them had become fairly well rooted in India. Thus, it was not for want of engineering solutions that drainage systems remained inadequate; it was mainly the dire economic conditions that these local bodies found themselves in that prevented the emergence of a functional and satisfactory system of urban drainage in India.
It’s now nearly 90 years since the aforementioned incidents took shape. While there are important qualitative differences between the challenges that contemporary urban India faces and what its colonial predecessor did, this article has alluded to some important enduring elements. Chief among this is the economic inability of India’s local bodies to build robust public infrastructure for delivering vital services — be it water, sanitation or drainage.
A recent report of the research organisation ICRIER titled Finances of Municipal Corporation in Metropolitan India alerts us that the dire financial position of these bodies continues to remain a major stumbling block for upgrading urban infrastructure. While it is difficult to come up with a clear recipe on how to improve urban living conditions in India not the least on the basis of historical work, one starting point certainly could be ensuring greater intervention of central and state governments in providing secure financial backing for these local bodies to build vital public services in our cities.
The author is an engineer turned PhD student with the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHoSTM) at King’s College, London, researching the history of sanitary infrastructures in late colonial Madras city
