Built to last

Infra spend must focus on climate change

The death by drowning of three civil services aspirants in the basement of a coaching centre in New Delhi last week is a tragic reminder of the gross corruption and negligence of urban bodies and money-making educational institutes in allowing an area marked for parking and storage to be used as a library. But beyond this depressing evidence of negligence, this disaster offers governments at the Centre and states a wakeup call when it comes to infrastructure planning and spending. Basements are common in the National Capital Region with its low water table and relatively dry climate. But as the rapid flood caused by heavy rain demonstrates, they may no longer be viable additions to building plans even for parking purposes. The truth is, climate change is altering the nature of the monsoon all over India, and infrastructure plans urgently need to adapt and be made more sustainable to cope with it.

The current monsoon season has demonstrated the troubling link between climate change and infrastructure planning like never before. In this season alone, the outer canopy of Terminal 1 of Delhi airport collapsed under the weight of unexpectedly heavy showers, killing one person. In riverine Bihar, 12 bridges collapsed over a period of 17 days. In the past decade, the emergence of the phenomenon of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFS) and flash floods, which have resulted in landslides and caused many deaths in the hilly states of Uttarakhand, Sikkim, and Himachal Pradesh, is another manifestation of the new climate paradigm. These serial accidents highlight two points. First, changing climate patterns will expose shoddy construction standards in new and expected ways. Second, they point to the urgent need for India to recalibrate its infrastructure spending in line with the exigencies of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns brought on by climate change. Global warming is altering rainfall patterns across the world, and the monsoons are no exception. The steady and predictable pace of monsoon precipitation through June and July has been replaced by erratic patterns of extended dry spells followed by short, unprecedented heavy showers, which impose new pressures on infrastructure.

As the basement tragedy in Delhi demonstrated, urban drainage systems built to old specifications no longer suffice — wider, deeper drains are needed to cope with the larger volumes of rainwater from a sudden deluge. This is as true of older cities (such as Delhi and Kolkata) where colonial-era drainage systems have not been augmented or upgraded. In newer cities, such as Bengaluru and Gurugram, the destruction of natural drainage systems such as lakes and water bodies and the construction of sewers built to old specifications highlight the problems. In Bihar, some of the bridges that collapsed had not even been completed and others are just 15 years old, raising suspicions of poor construction standards to begin with. Others are of British-era vintage calibrated to dated climate patterns. As a result, many of them have shallow foundations, which make them vulnerable during floods, which have increased in frequency. In the Budget for 2024-25, the Union government has allocated a record Rs 11 trillion for infrastructure. This provides it a unique opportunity to reorient the quality of spending on enforcing better standards and building sustainable infrastructure that stands the test of global warming-induced climate change.