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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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.