Yamuna rising: Experts call for better urban planning, governance

“We have the engineering solutions. It is a change in the governance approach that needs to be implemented. We know what to do, but it is the ‘who’ and ‘for whom’ that need to be defined. For me, drainage is a governance challenge and not an engineering problem. How effective multi-governance and convergence issues will work at city level will decide the transformation process,” he said.

For instance, he said, the 74th Amendment, which gives powers to municipal corporations, needed a re-look. The term of mayors was not uniform across cities, where some have a one-year term and others three years. Vaidya said extending the term of a mayor to five years should be considered in order to have one person accountable for implementation. “At the city level, we need to know where the buck stops,” he said.

“We need to take tough decisions today, otherwise we will lose the plot for transformation,” Vaidya said.

“Above all, the policy change needed to address urban flooding cannot be separate from the day-to-day decisions of a city,” said Parul Agarwala, the country programme manager of UN Habitat India. (Express photo by Tashi Tobgyal)

Prof. Kapil Gupta, of the Civil Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay and an expert who worked on some of the national guidelines on urban flooding, said cities needed to plan for extreme weather events as they are here to stay. Rainfall sensors and alarms; planting greenery on rooftops; making pavements out of porous materials; rainwater harvesting; and identification of low-lying areas that be used as holding ponds or parks in case of flood situations were among the mitigation measures cities should adopt, he said.

“There is a need for the government to take into account that we cannot wish extreme events away. Extreme events are here to stay and we should plan for it. The next flood is expected to be bigger than the one yesterday,” he said.

Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said the IPCC had clearly identified for the past few years that rainfall and its frequency would increase.

“Today, even areas around New York got flooded, so this is a global problem. When the drainage systems were designed 50 years ago, no one thought that rainfall intensities would increase. It was based on historical flood data. Before the 2005 Mumbai floods, the record rainfall was 550mm a day. After it, it was 944mm a day,” Prof. Gupta said.

Due to the pressures of urbanisation, he said cities had been constructed in low-lying areas, and even on water bodies, blocking the drainage paths. Another issue he flagged was the multiplicity of authority.

“In Delhi, Minto Bridge gets flooded every year. Ten years back, I had conducted a training and proposed a solution to the Delhi government. The area which gets flooded was then under MCD, the water comes from the area that is under NDMC and the bridge is of the Railways. We need to get all three agencies together for the solution to work,” he said.

He added there was no dearth of guidelines for cities to follow. “All the guidelines, codes and manuals are already there. The NDMA urban floods guidelines, the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry’s manual on storm water drainage system and the Indian Road Congress guidelines on urban drainage are there. If cities implement these, we will be better prepared for the next severe event,” he said.

Parul Agarwala, the country programme manager of UN Habitat India, pointed out that while the urban floods in the past few years had led cities to be better prepared, there was a wide disparity in terms of the response by different cities.

“While the experienced urban local bodies in cities such as Mumbai have put in place flood response protocols and advanced measures such as sensor-based early warning systems, cities are still learning to cope with urban flooding. Unfortunately, the immediate shock of a flood event does not tend to translate into an integrated policy response that may make cities truly ‘resilient’,” she said.

She said while the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) was providing funding to seven major cities as a part of the Finance Commission allocation, the cities needed to take the lead.

“The policy response needs to adapt itself to the rapid changes triggered by climate change and ground itself in people and communities. While traditional ‘grey infrastructure’ such as storm water drains are important, the recent flood events are increasingly demonstrating the limitations of a siloed approach,” she said.

Not only conventional interventions but nature-based solutions like increasing the permeable spaces and green cover were needed, she added.

“Above all, the policy change needed to address urban flooding cannot be separate from the day-to-day decisions of a city. It needs to be integrated into core aspects of city management such as land use, building permissions, hydrological management, etc,” Agarwala said.