Not just a question of weather anomalies, Climate Change will thrive in poorly planned urban sprawls in the coming years

Residents of Hyderabad are in a state of shock. Not one but twice within a week, the city has been swamped under unprecedented downpours and there is no clear answer to this outburst of nature that has left the city administration helpless. Figures of 160 mm to 320 mm rainfall in a day has left large parts of the city waterlogged and marooned and as every rise of water level adds to the toll of dead lives and damaged infrastructure, even current public health issues such as the covid pandemic takes an unfortunate backseat.

Though every incident of severe rainfall cannot be directly attributable to climate change, this unnaturally high rainfall is the result of a deep depression that originated in the Andaman seas and turned towards a north-northwest alignment and finally turned towards the Andhra coast in the past week. Though such depressions tend to dissipate quickly after touching land, the intensity of the present depression has magnified with the sheer amount of moisture contained within it. Augmenting this cocktail is the comparatively warm air prevalent in the atmosphere and what we had was the perfect storm that Telengana, North Karnataka and Hyderabad were least prepared for.

Singapur, a township within the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation witnessed 320 mm on rainfall on October 13th while as many as 11 stations received upto 200 mm of rain in a day. To compare, Agumbe, with its history of extremely high rainfall events, in the Malnad region of the Western Ghats of Karnataka records relatively few days of more than 200 mm in a day even in the peak of the monsoons in a good rainfall year. The number recorded in Hyderabad brings to light an increasingly ominous future where sudden downpours will become the normal and increased quantity of rainfall in a short period of time will devastate cities and states in an increasingly erratic pattern.

What makes this particular rainfall event even more devastating is that Singapur township again received 157.3 mm of rainfall on 17th October, a mere four days after the record breaking rains of 13th October. Such massive amounts of rainfall can overwhelm a well-planned nation and Hyderabad with its moderate infrastructure currently seems to have no answer to the deluge of the past few days.

Unfortunately, the city has received ample warnings about its infrastructure in the past. As recently as November, 2019, Srinivas Chary from the Centre of Urban Governance at the Administrative Staff College of India had spoken about the lack of infrastructural readiness and added that ‘Resistance to vagaries is high but Day-0 is a 365 day reality’. These grim warnings continue to be ignored and even when faced with sufficient data that extreme climate events have the potential to turn cities into flood traps, not enough action is taken to address the lacunae.

Some of the apparent causes of the immense flooding are easy to enumerate and even less surprisingly, most common people of Hyderabad can list the reasons with remarkable accurateness as would an expert. The state of the Musi river, poor drainage and unplanned construction holds true for the city but what stands as a grim reminder is by replacing the river Musi with Mithi, Ganga, Adyar, Saryu or any of the several stressed river systems in the country, incidents at Chennai, Mumbai or Hyderabad are but a precursor of the threats that most urban conglomerates in the country face.

While this particular incident happened in Hyderabad, the memories of the Chennai flood cannot be any longer dismissed as a once in a hundred-year event. While Hyderabad lost more than 3000 hectares of wetlands in a matter of years, Mumbai lost more than 71% of its wetlands, Bangalore lost 56%, Delhi and National Capital region lost about 38% and India as a nation has lost more than a third of its natural wetlands that have the unique capacity of managing excess water flow.

Added to the virtual vanishing of wetlands, India’s rivers starting from Badrinath where the Alaknanda gushes in its infant stage to the Yamuna in Delhi, Hooghly in Kolkata, Jhelum in Srinagar, Cauvery in Trichy and the unfortunate Mithi in Mumbai, the rivers in the country are dying a collective death. Massive encroachment, unauthorized construction, dumping of waste and the sheer inconvenience of some of these rivers have led to planners often shifting their natural flow in order to make space for an airport or a high-rise building. A country that was proud of its traditional water harvesting structures is audacious enough to foolhardily believe that rivers can be moved or trampled without any fear of consequences.

With the city flooded for a second time, administrators have estimated a cumulative loss of 6000 crores. In layman’s terms, the six feet deep hole in the Falaknuma railway bridge or the loss of lives or the very expensive breach in lakes is temporary as the city will soon get back at its feet and begin reconstruction on a warpath. Soon, in a few months, the memories of the floods would at best be recorded in slick documentaries or in the tales of the ‘dadis’ talking about that dreadful day in October. Just like Chennai or Mumbai or Assam, the unrelenting visage of continuous floods in the monsoon season of the year 2020 would be relegated to a faint memory in the flood fatigued TV viewer. The city would definitely stand up but would climate change jumping piggy-back upon a less than satisfactory urban infrastructure hold back now. Will climate change accelerate the cycle of disasters that increases each year and force urban planners to take stock and incorporate more resilience in their urban planning approach. We hope it happens before the next Hyderabad or Mumbai strikes again.

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