World’s greatest cities were founded on the banks of rivers (or other water sources such as lakes) to provide for not only drinking water but other basic amenities such as sanitation and transportation. What worked as a boon for our first urban dwellers has become a bane for our present cities.
While rivers flood due to natural causes from time to time, what has made this natural phenomenon a disaster is its increasing frequency and intensity due to interference by man.
Indian cities are growing at an unprecedented speed. Every day thousands migrate to urban areas in search for a better life creating pressure on the existing resources.
In the absence of an adequate infrastructure of drainage, sanitation and roads, there has been an increasing trend of urban flood disasters in India over the past several years. The most notable amongst them are Hyderabad in the year 2000, Mumbai in 2005, Kolkata in 2007, Srinagar in 2014 and Chennai in 2015. The issue is now once again making headlines due to last week’s floods in Mumbai.
While floods in a city indirectly affect almost every resident as communication and transportation are disturbed, low and middle-income groups are likely to be affected more. These groups are more vulnerable due to their limited capabilities to deal with a disaster because of poor quality and insecure housing; inadequate infrastructure; and lack of provision for health care, emergency services, and disaster risk reduction.
Impact Of Climate Change
Urban flood usually starts with very heavy and localised downpour which the existing infrastructure cannot manage. This severely disrupts public transport, electricity and communications and also plays havoc with the urban economy.
Heavy rainfall is always a complex geographical phenomenon and cannot be attributed to a single cause. For example, the 2015 flood in Chennai was explained associated the El Niño effect on the North East monsoon. The flooding of Mumbai in 2005 involved an interplay of four geographical factors, mainly the development of a low-pressure area over the northwest Bay of Bengal, intensification of the monsoon, strengthening of the Arabian Sea current of the monsoon, and the super positioning of a meso-scale off-shore vortex over northeast Arabian Sea (localised heavy clouds over the sea).
Global climatic changes have a profound and long term impact on natural phenomenon such as those mentioned above, thus disturbing their intensity, duration, frequency and spatial distribution. Climate scientists have long warned about changing monsoon rainfall patterns in India.
A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nation’s climate change body has argued an increased risk of flooding and alterations in rainfall patterns due to global warming. As opposed to the situation a few decades back, there are now more incidences of high-intensity rainfall concentrated over a short span of time and area instead of a steady monsoon season.
Is Unplanned Growth The Real Culprit?
What makes the effects of global climatic changes even more severe is the inability of our cities to cope up with the changing situation. Most of the sewerage and drainage network is old and unable to deal with the new challenges faced by our cities. They cannot handle the volume of water and are often blocked due to structural faults or pollution due to unwanted materials (plastic and other non-biodegradable).
As new constructions come up on hitherto permeable land, the runoff into drains increases. With the land hunger increasing, most of the cities also see real estate development encroach upon floodplains, thus obstructing floodways and disturbing the natural flow the water body.
Urbanisation thus has five major hydrological effects:
(1) increased water demand, often exceeding the available natural resources
(2) increased wastewater, burdening rivers and lakes and endangering the ecology
(3) increased peak flow
(4) reduced infiltration and
(5) reduced groundwater recharge, increased use of groundwater, and diminishing base flow of streams.
Planning For Resilient Cities For Future
The Government of India is a signatory to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015.
We are thus committed to mainstream disaster risk reduction by investing in resilient infrastructure, urban planning, land use, etc. to not only reduce the risk of flooding but reduce the losses of lives and livelihoods in case it occurs. While India has adopted this voluntary framework almost two years back, changes on the ground regarding civic planning, infrastructure and disaster mitigation is yet to be seen.
Much of the blame for unpreparedness of Indian cities to deal with natural hazards is put on municipal corporations. While most of the municipalities have been shamefully negligent of their duties, they alone cannot be blamed. The planning and development authorities are under the state governments (urban planning is a state subject). As a result, those who plan the cities have no accountability and those who are elected have no authority. While globally, cities are driving responses to deal with climate change, devolution of power to the city mayor and municipalities remain a mere formality.
Thus what is needed is a locally driven strategy to combat climate change and disaster management. It’s time that environment and disaster management are mainstreamed into the urban planning process in acknowledgement of the reality of climate change. Currently, the response of our city governments is ad hoc, and responsive, i.e. steps are taken to fix the damage caused by a calamity rather than planning in advance.
Complex challenges like this require a multi sectoral approach which should be ideally designed with inputs from multiple stakeholders. There must be an integration of climate sensitive sectors such as water, roads, sewerage, housing and so on rather than the current fractured approach of various departments. Local level planning would also make the process more flexible to deal with on ground challenges.
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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.