The rain Gods have blessed the National Capital Region with abundant water this year, but these blessings come with the curse of traffic chaos. From Gurugram to Ghaziabad, Vasant Kunj to Vaishali, Delhi is inundated and office-goers and school-children alike are struggling to get to their destinations.
If this was an isolated story of the 2024 monsoons, it would be understandable. No city in the world is designed to survive such heavy rainfall. The private weather forecaster, Skymet, told PTI on September 10, that Delhi had 913.1mm of rain these monsoons, 56 percent higher than normal. This is even before the deluge of the past 48 hours is accounted for. But this is a story of every monsoon in Delhi for the past quarter-century.
The sight of a submerged vehicle under Minto Bridge should now be enshrined as a ‘World Heritage Site’ by UNESCO, because it has become such an endemic image. Not an enduring image, an endemic image, an enduring image happens once and stays forever. This image is now an annual sight, sometimes twice to thrice every season. And while it must be noted that the authorities, including the Indian railways, the custodians of the bridge have made attempts to fix the problems, it appears unfixable.
But this is the issue in Delhi, we try to fix issues that we may not be able to fix instead of working out solutions to issues that can be, like repairing and rehabilitating Delhi’s sewer systems well before the monsoons, before the storm drains and sewers get clogged with the first flush of the rains.
Or to repair the roads well before the rains, instead of them becoming off-road obstacle courses and driving people to buy large SUVs instead of small cars — and this applies to all the satellite cities around Delhi as well, especially Gurugram.
In fact, Gurugram, home to large multinationals and some of the richest real-estate in India, where high-rise apartments in exclusive societies sell for over 25 crore has such serious flooding, that social media users called some of these apartments ‘River View’ homes as Golf Course Road had knee-deep water. In posh areas of Delhi as well, multi-million dollar basement apartments are flooded thanks to poor planning and a century-old sewage system on its last legs.
And then there are the buses. Delhi residents can sympathise with the fact that every day multiple buses, many of which are way past their sell-by date break down, often at awkward angles and invariably at the narrowest stretches of the road and cause kilometres-long traffic.
Yes, heavy rains which lead to bad traffic can happen, yes, there can be waterlogging. There can be subsidence and road blockages. But this does not mean the entire monsoon season is lost to such occurrences. Good city-planning, especially since city-planners in Delhi ought to know about the monsoons by now after a couple of millennia of the city being established, we should account for heavy rains.
Instead our city planners and municipal officers are busy raking in the moolah and giving planning permission willy-nilly and arresting innocent parties when things go wrong, like what happened in Mukherjee Nagar earlier this monsoon. Instead of desilting the drains well ahead of the monsoons and investing in new buses, the same old tamasha happens year after year. Our city politicians are busy trying to score brownie points against each other instead of looking for solutions towards making India’s capital a twenty-first century city.
And if we want to make a point, let us ensure that the image of a submerged vehicle at Minto Bridge never happens again. Because as long as that keeps happening, the citizens of Delhi and the NCR will know that the authorities are not serious.
