Maximum City, maximum floods

Unlike other cities, Mumbai picks itself up and goes about its business as before

“Mumbai is sinking”, headlined most print and electronic media after the deluge the city suffered on August 29.  India’s urbs prima and its commercial capital actually faces the ordeal of three floods, two seasonal and one perennial. Only one of them is caused by Mother Nature. Mumbai’s average annual rainfall of 2,258 mm is second only to Hong Kong’s 2,398 mm, among all megapolises of the world.  But Mumbai’s marginally smaller precipitation occurs in 79 rainy days (70 of them between June and September) as compared to 138 in Hong Kong. Thus, Mumbai copes with the highest average peak rainfall among global cities. Days of 100-plus mm rainfall occur annually, with 200-plus mm not being rare. On August 29, it rained 330 mm, most of it within five or six hours of the morning. Arguably, no city in the world is designed to effectively drain a one-day downpour of 300+ mm in view of the prohibitive cost. The disruptions are accepted as one-off events saving costs overall.

Mumbai drains into shallow seas, prone to higher tides in the monsoon.  If it rains heavily around high tide, water-logging lasts several hours. All expansion areas north and east of the island city have surface drains, accumulating mud and other solid wastes and clogging all too soon.  Keeping them free flowing through manual efforts is a Herculean task.

A second and perennial flood, that of migrants into Mumbai showing no sign of abating, compounds this. The Mumbai urban agglomeration population rose from 15.3 million in 2001 to 18.4 million in 2011. All but 0.5 million of this increase of 3.1 million is in areas outside the Greater Mumbai Corporation limits. The suburbs/exurbs are the new growth poles.  Humongous numbers daily commute to the island city, making transport the principal concern of urban management. Under heavy rain, such arteries choke without any possibility of stents or bypass.

It defies imagination as to how many people could squeeze into limited urban space. Mumbai is second on the Wikipedia list of most congested major cities of the world with over 28,000 people per sq km, after Metro Manila. But the Philippine capital is much smaller than Mumbai.  Dharavi is nearly 10 times as crowded (density of 270,000/sq km), possibly the world’s densest habitat. The consequences of such crowding for urban services, especially drainage and cleaning, are nightmarish.

Mumbai coped — somehow! — with a never-before one-day rainfall of 945 mm on July 26, 2005. Seven years later, even a 330-mm precipitation became nearly calamitous, not just because the administration was none the wiser, but primarily because there were perhaps two million more souls taxing the same facilities.

The flood of criticism that follows inevitably has only one target: Unpreparedness and apathy of the city administration, made worse by the all-pervasive corruption. These charges are well-deserved, but those outraged should ponder a simple question: In these circumstances, could even a squeaky clean municipal body with the whole-hearted support of the state government cope with nature’s fury of this magnitude?

Mumbai rain

The great challenge of keeping Mumbai safe from monsoon mayhem is helped in the least by that wonder of bureaucratic scientific establishment, the India Meteorological Department.  Despite all advances it claims, the Met still engages in what I had called “pastcasts” in these pages.  It failed to warn about the 2005 deluge. It was in evidence on August 29 only after the city was flooded, with dire warnings of extreme weather for the next 48 hours. Satellite pictures of the cloud cover had begun showing quite rapid clearing. It rained under 10 mm on August 30.

The talking heads suggest many solutions: More powers to the city administration (as in the United States), prepare the city for meeting even once-in-100-years situation, continuous monitoring and cleaning of drains and, ultimately, a planned and systematic de-population.

Even a quick scrutiny shows the futility of such suggestions. Power devolution or de-population are major political decisions, anathema to all concerned. A revamping of drainage or raising road/rail levels would entail costs and disruptions of an exceptionally unacceptable level.  In short, the noise in the media is just that — noise.

Mumbai represents the existential dilemma of urban India: Too few natural or financial resources to cope with ever-rising numbers and even greater aspirations. Yet unlike other cities (Delhi drowns in 100 mm, which Mumbai shrugs off), Mumbai picks itself up with the least fuss and goes about its business as before, as witnessed after 26/07 or 26/11. Which is why it is the Maximum City.