Context
Inundated roads, waterlogged streets, tractors plying through flooded localities to ferry people to safer locations—that was the kind of mayhem caused by heavy rains in Bengaluru in September 2022. Bengaluru, the Silicon Valley of India, has grown to become the information technology (IT) hub of the country. It has attracted the best of IT enthusiasts from all over the country in search of opportunities in the IT industry. The mayhem and the resultant halt to life and livelihood in Bengaluru raised a big question mark on the city’s preparedness as a metropolitan city to mark a global footprint.
Introduction
The incumbent state government cited unprecedented rainfall and the resultant overflowing water bodies as responsible for the urban deluge. The government claimed that the city had received the highest rainfall in the last 42 years. As a result, all of the city’s 164 water tanks filled to the brim; some breached their banks and the water camped on the city’s streets, in parking lots and houses, and hence the deluge. However, analysts have tracked the current chaos and those that took place earlier to the systemic failure of city’s urban planning governance and related factors.
In fact, not just Bengaluru, but a number of cities in the country has to face this problem of urban flooding during rainy season: Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, etc., to name a few. Is this a failure of our urban planning strategy? Does it raise a question mark on the sustainability of rapid urban development taking place in the country? Do we factor in a number of changing climatic patterns such as intense rainfalls, increasing heat waves phenomenon in the country and beyond in our urban planning strategy and preparing our cities accordingly? These are some of the questions that require our urban policy makers to ponder over.
Factors for the Deluge
Some of the factors responsible for the problem of deluge include the following:
- Decline in vegetation cover Bengaluru, in the 1990s, used to be a city of lakes, gardens with a cool and ambient climate. As per an analysis by T.V. Ramachandra, (associated with the Centre for Ecological Sciences at Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru) vegetation cover of Bengaluru, which stood at 68 per cent of the city’s total area of 741 square kilometres in early 1970s, dropped to around 45 per cent in the 1990s, and further to less than 3 per cent in 2021. Green cover in a city plays the crucial role of helping absorb and temporarily hold the storm water and thus protect the built up spaces from getting flooded. The decline in vegetation cover came at the cost of unbridled growth of concrete jungles in the city, often encroaching upon the city’s green spaces due to vested interests such as powerful real estate lobby in the city and an ineffective civic administration.
With the rise of Bengaluru as the hub of IT in the country, the city attracted millions of workers from all over the country. Consequently, the city became the regional headquarters of some of the world’s biggest IT enterprises including Google, Accenture, IBM, and Oracle, among others. To meet the demand for office space to accommodate the influx of IT workers, the city witnessed boom in real estate. This untrammelled expansion came at the price of loss of city’s green cover. The construction spree often resulted in choking off the natural drainage in the city such as blocking the connecting canals to lakes which absorbed and siphoned off storm water in the event of an incessant rainfall.
- Unplanned and unbridled infrastructure In the rush to meet the requirements of accommodating people (habitations), cities often tend to grow without meticulous planning and sustainable expansion. Cities are the engines of economic growth, and the abode of economic activities. Bengaluru hosts more than 3,500 IT companies and some 79 ‘tech parks’—upmarket premises that house offices and entertainment areas catering to technology workers.
- Outdated drainage system The drainage system in our cities has rarely been designed taking into account storm water challenges posed by sudden downpour. Drainage system in our cities is based on the sewerage requirements. Besides, the drains are poorly maintained, often clogged, and encroached upon. Urban floods have been in news since 2005 and since then growing continuously across different cities in the country. Smaller cities too are facing prospects of urban flooding, which poses a question mark on the design of urban expansion.
- Changes in rainfall pattern due to climate change The imminent threat of climate change and the resultant global warming phenomenon has the potential to disrupt the normal climatic conditions as is evident from instances of intense rainfall, increased intensity of heat waves, shortened winter season, etc.
- Unresilient post-disaster response Usually, our response to disasters such as urban flooding and others is more focused on post-disaster relief and rehabilitation, and recovery rather than building resilience in the urban drainage system and aspects related to it. Least focus is given on improving the adaptability to extreme climatic events and such other situations.
- Absence of master plan As per data from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, more than 65 per cent of urban settlements in the country do not have a master plan for the city’s future expansion and development. Surprisingly, urban planning in India has not received the kind of attention that it requires.
- Haphazardly increasing urbanisation As per the NITI Aayog Report on Urban Planning Capacity 2021, more than half of India’s population is going to live in cities by the year 2050. As a result of unplanned development due to unsustainable urban planning, cities such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Surat, etc., have been expanding haphazardly such as slums in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, etc. (Slums are highly populated urban residential areas consisting of densely built housing units associated to poverty. Dharavi in Mumbai is the largest slum habitation in Asia.) They also come into existence a result of failing to plan cities’ growth and expansion.
Problem in Bengaluru
According to experts, rapid urban expansion, often featuring illegal structures, has affected nearly 200 of the city’s lakes and a network of canals that once connected them. Many of the lakes have been filled up; others have been shrinking through slow and stealthy encroachment and increasing construction activities in Bengaluru. This has greatly compromised the drainage system of the city. As a result, in the event of a heavy downpour, city’s drainage systems are unable to keep up, especially in low-lying areas of the city, leading to water logging and the phenomenon of urban flooding. The same is true to other cities such as Mumbai, New Delhi, and Chennai, etc.
Reasons for Poor Urban Planning
Some of the reasons for poor urban planning are as follows:
- Disintegration and lack of coordination Urban governance bodies responsible for providing civil facilities such as water supply, waste management, maintenance of drainage system in the city, fire services, transport services, etc., are disintegrated in our cities. In other words, urban governance structure in our cities is fractured. Therefore, when a disaster strikes, the disintegrated urban governance structure poses a big challenge of coordination among the concerned agencies.
- Poor urban planning for lack of vision Planning of our cities lacks inclusion of prospective climate and environmental risks due to climate change and associated effects. The master plan for our metropolitan cities has failed to integrate environmental and climatic risks into city planning.
- Outdated building and storm water design Our urban policy makers failed to take into account the need to reform the building and storm water drainage designs in our cities, especially when rainfall patterns overtime has become more intense. In fact, roof slopes, rainwater pipes, storage and recharge structures, and storm water drains—all need to conform to the changing pattern of rainfall. Our predictive powers and models of rainfall events also need to be improved.
- Uneconomical and irrational floor area ratio Floor area ratio (FAR) or floor space index (FSI) in India is low and is considered a hurdle to construction activities and has resulted in horizontal growth of cities, associated problems of slums, and encroachments, among others. (According to Investopedia, FAR is the relationship between the total amount of usable floor area that a building has, or has been permitted to have, and the total area of the plot on which the building stands.) A higher FAR may indicate a dense or urban construction. FAR is the limit imposed on the amount of construction in a certain plot of land or location. In other words, FAR controls building volume in accordance with a previously developed master plan for that location. FAR parameters vary from state to state and are governed by the respective city development authorities.
Sustainable Solution
The very waters that caused the mayhem in Bengaluru, and other cities alike, can become a boon for the city if properly allowed to flow and get stored in a systematic way in water bodies such as lakes, ponds, etc., within the city and beyond. In this regard, the following points may be worth consideration:
- Clearing of drainage system Drains have been damaged/choked either due to encroachment or due to solid/plastic waste being dumped into drainage channels. Therefore, all the drains have to be cleaned on a war-footing mode. It will also improve the flow of rainwater into lakes and ponds within the cities as well as correct the outflow.
- Regional drainage planning In the medium term (over a time span of 3–5 years), ‘regional drainage planning’ can be undertaken, keeping in mind the drainage requirements of cities such as a storm water surge due to a sudden intense rainfall in the future.
- Vertical growth of cities Our cities need to grow vertically as horizontal expansion consumes a lot of land to meet the demand for housing in urban areas. (Horizontal expansion of a city means building up houses using vacant land and thus occupying more land every year. Horizontal growth leads to encroachment of land.) On the other hand, vertical expansion is done by building skyscrapers or high-rise buildings.
- Engines of economic growth Being the hub of economic activities, cities will continue to attract people from distant locations, as reflected by increasing urbanisation in the country. People of all making–low-skilled and high-skilled—look for better opportunities in metropolitans such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi, etc. As such, the master plan of these metropolitans will have to include the future immigration trends and prepare accordingly.
- Revising existing plans Besides preparing cities’ master plans keeping in mind the future requirements, the existing plans of cities also need to be revisited/reviewed by taking into consideration factors such as climate change, migration of people to some cities more than others (Bengaluru being a prime example), etc.
- Post-disaster response The state government of Karnataka agreed to spend Rs 3 billion (US$ 37.8 million) to help manage the flood situation, including removing unauthorised developments, improving drainage systems, and controlling water levels in lakes. The state government also announced to set up a body to manage Bengaluru’s traffic and start discussions on a new storm water drainage project along a major highway. On a bitter note, the government did awake from its slumber albeit after Bengaluru had been hit by floods. The government promised a slew of measures to correct the anomaly. However, once the situation normalises, things may return to their status quo.
Besides urban floods, floods in rural areas are also a regular phenomenon in India, particularly in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Odisha, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, etc., due to heavy rainfall, landslides, river overflow, severe weather-related incidents, and so on. Every year, lakhs of people are affected due to displacement, loss of crops and livestock, and habitation, whereas thousands breathe their last. As per the Indian National Disaster Management Authority (NDMI), about 1,45,700 individuals were displaced this year, while over 1,21,200 houses were damaged or destroyed across Assam only.
Conclusion
Given India’s aspirations to become a developed country by 2047, concerns regarding our cities, as deliberated above, have to be addressed on a priority basis. Being the hub of economic activities, cities are the engines of economic growth. Therefore, metropolitans like Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi, etc., need to be given special focus in terms of fund allocation and planning. Regional level planning is a state subject, yet the Government of India should take a lead in the matters of planning of major cities in the country by leveraging technology, manpower, finance, etc. Similarly, ascertaining the urban capacity of cities in our country is utmost important. (Urban capacity is defined in terms of what population a city can support depending on availability of space, water supply, power supply, traffic carrying capacity of roads, i.e., the ability of civic infrastructure in that city to support a certain population pressure.) Therefore, a scientific study of a city’s carrying capacity is extremely important to prevent any disaster from taking place due to poor civic infrastructure.
Therefore, the government of India should pay serious attention towards this great menace and bring out a solid and fool-proof policy to mitigate and contain this havoc at the national level.
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