Recent rains in southern side of India caused lot of loss to human life and property. Losses are unavoidable when there’s very heavy rain. Swift rescue and relief alone are indicators of a good government. These words are intended to normalise a human-made disaster, and gloss over the pathology of urban development under successive administrations. It is quite usual for politicians to blame nature for the havoc cause. Both the civic officials and the government machinery generally blame so-called unprecedented rains for the civic and humanitarian crisis. Each monsoon brings and decouples development from disaster. But unprecedented rains occur quite regularly in Tamil Nadu as it lies in the eastern coast of India. As a city on the high-energy coast facing the Bay of Bengal, Chennai in particular is no stranger to heavy rains and cyclonic storms. Chennai has experienced particularly heavy rains roughly once every 10 years – 1969, 1976, 1985, 1996, 1998, 2005, 2015.
In the torrential rain in the last three days rainfall is not even the big daddy of big rains. The Nungambakkam rain gauge recorded 270 mm on October 27, 2005; 280 mm in 1969, and 450 mm in November 1976. But still the disaster management failed as there is no such working force to act at the time of floods. Even in 1976, Adyar overflowed its banks and invaded first-floor houses. But those were the days when Chennai was derided for being an overgrown village, an underdeveloped aspirant to metropolitan status.
Chennai has a host of expensive infrastructure aimed at ushering in a “Make in Chennai” boom – a brand-new airport built on the flood plains of the River Adyar, a sprawling bus terminal in flood-prone Koyambedu, a Mass Rapid Transit System constructed almost wholly over the Buckingham Canal and the Pallikaranai marshlands, expressways and bypass roads constructed with no mind to the tendency of water to flow, an IT corridor and a Knowledge Corridor consisting of Engineering Colleges constructed on water bodies, and automobile and telecom SEZs and gated residential areas built on important drainage courses and catchments. There is no proper storm water management and the drainage slits are not cleaned up periodically or at least before the start of monsoon season. As a matter of fact, there is not proper drainage system in many areas surrounding the city. Adding fuel to the fire, the Metro project and the fly overs constructed in prime localities made a mess of the situation during this monsoon season.
With every invitation to make Chennai, a smart city, the Metro is eroding its resilience to perfectly normal monsoon weather events. The infrastructure of big commerce has replaced the infrastructure to withstand natural shocks. The 2015 disaster was not just avoidable; it was a direct consequence of decisions pushed for by vested interests and conceded by town planners, bureaucrats and politicians in the face of wiser counsel. But in the year 2017, the same situation prevails and people are put under stress to combat water logging in most part of the city. The political rivalry caused among the parties misunderstands and disrupt meaningful development to the city. At this rate we will come across such disasters in future also as we face global warming leading to an unprecedented rains and climatic changes in the city is in the offing.
Nickhil Mani
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
