The authorities managing Bhubaneswar claim that they have invested efficiently on one of India’s premier academic institutions, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), as their consultant to prepare city’s comprehensive development plan and zonal plans.
However, there seems to be too much trust on the IIT by top level politicians and officials having little knowledge on urban planning. In reality, the IITs are not the best in urban planning consulting, nor do they have proper understanding of Bhubaneswar’s urban pattern, its structure, geology, hydrology, morphology, geography and culture etc.
The result is mad urban planning that has encouraged construction in areas that were once known as not suitable for construction. This has given rise to massive real estate development. The recent rainfall once again raised question why it took hours to go anywhere as roads were flooded everywhere and there was no difference between roads, drains and sewerage channels. Severe water logging at major points troubled traffic, which got stuck up in certain pockets.
Perhaps it is the lack of accountability that results in this kind of mess year after year. Unless the people are punished in the system, the mess will continue. It shows how unprepared is the State capital to cope with normal rainfall of a day, forget about cyclone and heavy torrential rains. Every year the citizens were fooled by local bodies without answering where the money goes when the situation remains the same.
Rather, it reminds us of the mess that big cities like Mumbai, Delhi or Hyderabad face in past during unprecedented rains. We just can’t blame it on politicians for water logging; rather it is about bad engineering, designing, construction and management. There is not enough space for drains. The existing drains are blocked because of new buildings. look at Bhubaneswar in the1950s and you won’t find any water logging in areas such as Unit 1, Unit 2, Secretariat, State Assembly, Airport and Governor House and a few areas for quite a long time due to better design, plan, slope, level and better governance.
But with unscientific growth of Bhubaneswar, adequate attention has not been paid to the construction and design part. It’s not easy to solve the problem when we have full of wrongly designed drains, roads and new flyovers blocking flow of water. We have sweepers meant to clean the roads but every day they sweep the waste into the drains.
We have households who unabashedly dump waste into drains, leading to their clogging. We have to ensure that drainages are designed as per level and slope and no construction is allowed in low lying areas. We need to have sound municipal governance and visible actions on the offenders.
(Dr Rout is an urban planner and founder, local Governance Network)