Until early June, several parts of Mumbai were gripped by water shortage, with concerns mounting that the levels in reservoirs supplying India’s financial capital were dangerously low. Just weeks later, the city’s anxieties have been turned on their head. Relentless monsoon rain has submerged roads, inundated homes, disrupted suburban rail services, forced schools to suspend classes and exposed the vulnerability of neighbourhoods built on low-lying land.
Yet, any framing of Mumbai’s predicament in terms of alternating extremes would not be entirely accurate. Maharashtra’s capital receives around 2,400 millimetres of rainfall annually; by no stretch of the imagination can it be called water-poor. The city’s annual swing between thirst and flooding is actually a commentary on the utilitarian imagination of water in urban India: As a resource to be extracted during the dry months and an inconvenience during the monsoon. What has virtually disappeared is the understanding of water as an integral part of ecological systems.
In Unruly Waters: How Mountains, Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History, historian Sunil Amrith argues that the Subcontinent’s relationship with water has long been marked by a desire to engineer it — by damming rivers, reclaiming wetlands, embanking floodplains and straightening channels. Such interventions undoubtedly brought benefits: They increased food security and allowed people to build homes and create economic avenues. But water, as scholars such as Amrith remind us, resists the certainties of conventional engineering. That areas such as Kurla, Sion and Hindmata in Mumbai — or ITO in Delhi or Bellandur in Bengaluru or parts of South Chennai — are inundated whenever it pours speaks to water’s enduring fidelity to geography.
For centuries, the landscape that became Mumbai functioned as a sophisticated natural water system. Marshes, mangroves, creeks, estuaries and wetlands absorbed rainfall, moderated tides and gradually released excess water into the sea. The city itself emerged from seven islands stitched together through successive reclamation projects. However, as Mumbai expanded, it followed precisely the trajectory that Amrith has traced. The result is that rainwater now has nowhere to go except into streets, homes and overburdened drains.
Climate change has magnified these vulnerabilities. The warming Arabian Sea is increasing atmospheric moisture, making extreme rainfall events more intense even if seasonal rainfall totals do not always change dramatically. At the same time, sea-level rise is reducing the city’s ability to drain itself during high tides. When intense rainfall coincides with tidal surges, stormwater cannot easily flow into the sea, causing it to back up into drains and low-lying neighbourhoods.
Mumbai’s annual cycle of scarcity and inundation is not an isolated failure but a manifestation of a planning philosophy that has come to define urbanisation across the country. Delhi faces a severe groundwater crisis, while the river Yamuna is reduced to a trickle during the dry season. Bengaluru has witnessed the destruction of hundreds of interconnected lakes even as neighbourhoods alternate between water shortages and flash floods. Chennai lurched from an acute drinking water crisis in 2019 to devastating floods within a few years.
It is time, therefore, to question urban planning systems that view water only through the binaries of shortage and deluge. There is no doubt that Indian cities need to modernise their ageing drainage systems and install pumping stations. But, as urban planners in several parts of the world increasingly argue, that alone will not be sufficient. About two decades ago, Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu articulated a radically different vision of urban water management — one that sought to work with nature rather than overpower it. His proposition was simple: Cities should behave like sponges rather than pipelines.
A waterlogged stretch on Narangi Bypass Road in Virar West following heavy monsoon rains Express photos by Akash Patil
Instead of treating rainwater as an inconvenience to be flushed away as quickly as possible, sponge cities seek to absorb, filter, store, and gradually release it. Parks become temporary detention basins. Wetlands are restored rather than reclaimed. Green roofs reduce runoff. Permeable pavements allow rainwater to infiltrate the ground. Urban forests slow the movement of water while improving biodiversity and reducing heat.
After the disastrous Beijing floods of 2012, China incorporated many of Kongjian Yu’s ideas into its Sponge City programme across dozens of urban centres. The objective extends beyond flood prevention. Sponge cities recharge groundwater, improve water quality, reduce urban heat islands, strengthen biodiversity and enhance long-term water security. The country’s long-term target, outlined in the 2015 Sponge City guidelines, is for more than 80 per cent of urban areas to capture and reuse at least 70 per cent of annual rainfall by 2030.
China is not the only country to have reimagined the relationship between cities and water. Variants of the sponge city concept exist across the world. South Korea has incorporated its principles into urban development, Singapore has integrated reservoirs, wetlands and parks into its urban fabric, while Curitiba in Brazil has preserved floodplains as public parks that safely accommodate floodwaters, breaking down the rigid divide between ecological assets and civic infrastructure. The concept of “blue-green” infrastructure is evident in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Copenhagen in Denmark and Medellín in Colombia, while Kigali’s early efforts to strengthen groundwater resilience through flood-prevention measures have earned international recognition for Rwanda’s capital.
For India, the lesson is not to replicate any one such model but to rediscover a forgotten principle: Places are not built apart from water; their fates are intertwined with living hydrological systems. The sooner India’s cities learn to plan with water rather than against it, the more resilient their future will be.
The writer is senior associate editor, The Indian Express. kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com
Traffic on the Mumbai–Pune Expressway’s ‘Missing Link’ was disrupted after a landslide. (Express Photo by Narendra Vaskar) 
A waterlogged stretch on Narangi Bypass Road in Virar West following heavy monsoon rains Express photos by Akash Patil
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