The season's showers have brought relief and pain in equal measure in the metros of Mumbai and Bengaluru, already flooded and potholed with authorities swiftly requisitioning the services of NDRF (National Disaster Response Force) personnel. With older city infrastructure clearly not equipped to handle extreme climatic events that are increasing in frequency because of climate change, radical re-organsiation and planning are the need of the hour. With a mushroom cloud of suburban satellites around our metros, the problem seems to be the very frequent change of land use that prevents water from soaking into the ground in open areas and water bodies.
In the absence of natural sinks and vegetation and with most of the space taken up by tarmac and concrete, our cities are becoming impervious and resulting in backflush of voluminous flows that tear down everything in their wake. Add to this clogging and silting of drains and monsoon management worsens season after season. Till a crisis happens, any city administration's preparedness is at best tardy. By the time we declog our drains, they are filled up again with current trash loads. Mumbai's problems have to do with land reclamation and the denudation of the catchment areas of the canals and creeks which just reverse the tide of the seas back into the city. Preparedness will now have to be a year-round effort as we get swamped by a deluge in a matter of hours.