India is losing its battle with climate change. The twin tragedies of 3 students suffocating in the basement of the Rau’s IAS Study Circle in the Capital, and landslides wiping out of entire villages in Wayanad, Kerala on Tuesday night are grim reminders of our failure to understand nature’s fury.
Delhi’s grim basement death trap is still being investigated, but the initial magisterial findings reveal the Old Rajendra Nagar area’s drainage system was inadequate to deal with the quantity of water that flooded the basement in which the Rau Classes library was situated.
On the fateful day, water, having nowhere else to go, entered the basement with such force that it filled the room where the students were trapped till the ceiling, and jammed the biometric-operated doors. But the big question is: How were study classes permitted in a basement, when municipal law permits basements only for storage?
In Wayanad, as army engineers struggle to connect cut-off areas of Chooralmala to reach the worst hit spots, the questions being asked are: why was human habitation allowed at the foot of these landslide prone hills? Why was there no learning from the August 2019 disaster in Puthumala – 5 kms away – where landslides claimed 17 lives?
Urban planning fails
The tragic deaths in Delhi of students has once again underlined the sordid failure of city planning. The Capital’s municipal government has not learnt anything if the viral videos of a flooded Rajya Sabha hall and journalists enjoying a drink amid the sloshing waters in the Press Club of India’s lounge on Rafi Marg are any indication.
It happens almost every monsoon. A heavy shower inundates a large part of the Capital; and when there is no storm water drains to take away the water, roads of the city come to serve the purpose. It was the same story in Dubai in April. The engineers built a spanking city of glass and boulevards; but forgot to build a drainage system.
As climate change shifts monsoon patterns, cloudbursts and torrential rains have become common place. For rapidly expanding cities, the problem has been compounded by not being able to put water disposal systems in place. Indian cities are drowning in flood waters because uncontrolled concretization and construction has cemented vast swathes of surfaces not allowing water to seep naturally into underground streams and aquifers.
Many cities like Delhi and Mumbai are on the banks of rivers – Delhi abuts the Yamuna while the River Mithi divides the island city and suburban Mumbai. These natural water courses are choked with human habitation on the banks, and dumping of waste. So when the rains come and the river courses can’t discharge the huge volumes, they overflow the banks and enter the city.
Despite Mumbai’s mess, the city keeps going because it has invested for over a century and a half in building storm water drains. At the core of the island city’s system are British-period 440 kms of huge, underground drains. The labyrinthine network also includes 2,000 kms of open drains, 186 marine outfalls that dump the city’s water in the ocean and 269 kms of big nullahs that crisscross the city.
Interestingly, two waterlogging points in the city – the Kings Circle Gandhi Market and the Hind Mata crossing, near Dadar – have now been taken off the ‘problem list’due to some smart thinking by municipal engineers.
They constructed massive holding underground tanks near these low-lying areas. When flood waters threatened to rise, massive pumps pushed 2.33 lakh litres of water per minute into these tanks keeping the traffic points clear. Later, the water from the holding tanks is pumped into the sea at low tide to make way to receive another batch of flood waters.
Other cities have adopted the same strategy. Chennai, which used to face a nightmare with rain water flooding its multiple underpasses, has now deployed Smart City Mission funds to set up a high-tech Command and Control Centre (CCC) that oversees 50 underpasses. Whenever flood waters begin to choke any of the underpasses, heavy duty suction pumps are deployed to pump out the water and restore traffic movement.
Nature’s warnings
At Wayanad, we are still counting the dead. The sheer loss, now nearing 300 lives, will for sure trigger a round of inquiries and hypothesis. But nobody can say nature had not set out its warnings.
The picturesque hills have over the years been subject to intense non-forest activity as the pressure of tourism has expanded roads, resorts and deforestation. The region has also seen a change from the heavy foliage trees to plantation crops such as tea and cardamom.
The shallow-root plantations cannot hold the soil during heavy rainfall. With climate change and warmer air, comes an increasing number of cloudbursts, which Wayanad has been experiencing. Warmer air holds more moisture, leading to the development of vertical clouds that can discharge very heavy rains in a short amount of time.
Wayanad, part of the Wester Ghats, is ecologically fragile and needs to be protected from rampant construction and deforestation. The 14-year old Madhav Gadgil Report has pleaded with the government to declare the Wester Ghats an eco-sensitive zone, so protective restrictions can be imposed. Gadgil’s warnings have gone abegging. So do we just wait around till the next tragedy strikes?