Background: –
Urban flooding is a problem long associated with Mumbai. With a steady increase in the occurrence and severity of extreme weather events, Mumbai has lost that relative exclusivity, with Chennai and now Bangalore revealing a propensity to be flooded.
As climate change proceeds, cloudbursts and heavy downpours are likely to grow ever more frequent, and urban flooding is likely to become a more frequent, widespread and destructive challenge.
It will not go away by ignoring it. India has to plan how to stay dry in a wetter future.
The modern economy cannot afford to shut down because it rained or because it did not for a long period.
The short point is, floodproofing cities is not just about sparing their denizens occasional bouts of extreme inconvenience but also sustaining economic vibrancy of the city in question and of the country in general.
UN-Habitat: –
UN Habitat is an under-appreciated arm of the United Nations.
Its conference in 2016, in Ecuador, produced a Quito Declaration on a New Urban Agenda, contained a vision of sustainable urbanization; and substantive details on how to achieve it.
It is a document that urban planners would do well to look up, apart from resources available at the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Urban Planners: –
In 2015, the government informed Parliament that India had 5,000 urban planners. It is estimated that the number has gone up to some 6,000 now.
Such scarcity of urban planning capacity does not blight developed countries. The state of California alone has 7,750, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, with the US national total coming in at 38,940.
The Quito declaration, later endorsed by the UN General Assembly, commits nations to “promoting the creation and maintenance of well-connected and well-distributed networks of open, multipurpose, safe, inclusive, accessible, green and quality public spaces, to improving the resilience of cities to disasters and climate change, including floods, drought risks and heat waves, to improving food security and nutrition, physical and mental health, and household and ambient air quality, to reducing noise and promoting attractive and liveable cities, human settlements and urban landscapes and to prioritizing the conservation of endemic species”.
Ensuring that cities do not flood, that the water produced by excessive rain would flow away is as much planning and politics as engineering and design.
Thriving cities demand ever expanding residential and office space. The temptation is high to fill up water bodies, canals and drains and build over these.
That must be resisted, not only by conscientious city regulators but by a public sensitized to the need to keep open the channels through which water drains away from their environs.
Keeping the cities open, drained and breathing must become part of the politics of urban governance, political promises before elections.
Storm water drains must be laid out such as to not interfere with the working of the sewage disposal system—otherwise, sewage could back up into places where it should not.
The sewerage network must be planned, in terms of articulation, as well as depth, so that even wastewater from low-lying parts of the town’s topography would drain away, if necessary, into artificial wells, from which water can be pumped out through pipelines, if necessary. Water can be recycled, too, and made fit to drink, with modern technology.
Climate change means that towns can experience both extreme heat and excessive rains. Planning the layout of buildings to avoid the build-up of heat islands will also help build roads with drainage.
Sometimes, to prevent urban flooding, the basic work required might be outside the city altogether: desilting rivers that overflow, inundating towns instead of draining their runoff, and building walls to insulate a coastal town from rising sea levels.
India initiated a global coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure. Indian city and state governments should not be shy about using its intellectual and other resources to prepare against urban flooding, nor the Central government, for that matter.
The cities in which the majority of India’s future urbanites would dwell are yet to be built—India is only one-third or so urban, while China’s level of urbanization is double that.
India would also reach similar levels of urbanization, and fairly rapidly, should economic growth gather momentum.
That would mean building new towns to accommodate another 46 crore Indians.
It is high time India took urban planning and urban governance seriously.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.