From monsoon magic to mayhem and what cities can do about it

The first raindrops hit large swathes of concrete in cities and cool them down. As the monsoon gathered steam, skies darkened, sheets of rain descended for days, blurring skylines and washing entire cities, the monsoon magic was meant to unfold. The blistering urban heat was meant to cool down, spaces opening up for reflection, taking in simple joys such as walking in the rain and fresh air, seeing nature renew itself. The monsoon magic was supposed to swell a city’s rivers and water bodies, bring the sea closer, wrap thunder in a hundred stories, sprout new shoots, teach us new patterns in the web of life, besides the cliched-but-valid  chai-pakoda revelries in both posh apartments and humble homes.

Instead, the euphoria of the monsoon barely lasts the first hour or a day – that too only for the few who can afford the indulgence. For millions in cities, monsoon means flooding and water-logging, severe disruptions in daily lives, accidents and macabre death, not knowing if a pothole will claim lives on an everyday route or a familiar bridge will collapse like a pack of cards, frantic checking of weather forecasts and debating their veracity, being stranded for hours without food or water, higher monthly expenses and more.

The monsoon has come to mean worrying about nothing in particular but nursing a strange anxiety that lingers. Just getting through the season with dear ones unharmed, life and limbs intact, feels like an achievement lately. Many of us have quietly put away the joy, musings, and impromptu gatherings. The monsoon mayhem and morbidity, now our companions, have taken over its magic. Drudgery, disruptions and death have replaced the delight, relief and abandon that many of us remember. 

This unwritten script played out in New Delhi in June when the heavy rainfall inundated large areas of the city, in Mumbai where roads turned into roaring rivers in the super-heavy showers this week, Guwahati where the monsoon has meant endless flooding, Bengaluru which discovered last year that rain water will rush into erstwhile lakes where swanky IT parks now stand, Srinagar whose picturesque terrain has been frequently flooded, or most cities across India. It is the same story every year; some cities face the trial annually, others wait in trepidation for their turn.

Where did the magic go?
Rainfall can be soothing and therapeutic but the opposite is also true. Sudden or prolonged rainstorms followed by flooding and disruptions can trigger anxiety, depression and, in some, even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).^[1] ‘Monsoon Blues’ are perhaps as old as the season itself but the anxiety and PTSD go well beyond such mood swings.

Take a pause and think: do the rains cause us to become anxious or is it the structure and flow of life in our cities that are unable to cope with the rain?

As writer CY Gopinath told Question of Cities, “The rain equalises everyone, rich and poor alike…Onc rainy day in Mumbai, my brother fell into a manhole and broke his forearm. After that, I avoided going out in the rains in Mumbai but when I moved to Bangkok 17 years ago, I rediscovered the joy of a walk in the rain. I fell in love with the rain again.”

Cities are human-made places, the built environment. Wilderness and nature once stood here in resplendence. The natural profile was vastly transformed in the making of cities as ‘engines of growth’. Not merely changed but damaged, pared down, razed, stripped away, ruined or ravaged to a point where rainwater was left with no space and no path to go out of the city. 

Rivers were narrowed to drains, lakes were built upon, streams were filled up, wells were turned into history markers, ponds were neglected, mudflats and creeks were landfilled, open areas where water collected in severe rainfall became construction areas, hills flattened out for buildings, trees that took the brunt of heavy rain chopped across thousands of hectares, their roots no longer holding down the soil or soaking moisture into the earth, urban forests permitted to be cut down by those responsible to protect them. Where is the rainwater supposed to go?

The natural interconnectedness between forests, hills and waterbodies lies in shambles in every city of India, whether made in the early post-independent years like Chandigarh^[2] or expanded in the past few decades like Guwahati.^[3] In the India of 1950-60s, urban development was the goal, perhaps even the need of a new nation that had to be built brick by brick, city by city; conserving natural ecology was not on the mainstream agenda.

This template of building cities ran its course years ago; it should have been discarded at the turn of the century if not earlier. The Rio Summit of 1992 alerted us that climate change would alter, mildly or severely, the patterns of rainfall, heat and cold as we knew the seasons. Studies have shown since that the seasons have become more intense, more frequent, often surprising us with rain in November-December in cities where it used to retreat in September. How then can the old template of city-making continue in the face of climate change-induced intense rainfall in shorter periods of time?

Authorities cannot plead helplessness when the skies open up mercilessly (or the mercury rises beyond belief) and retreat into the usual ‘development’ talk at ‘normal’ times. Governments cannot remain stuck in the previous era of city-making through the year and acknowledge climate change only during heavy rain (or intense heat), ignoring the urgent need to plan and build cities in nature-led sustainable ways. They cannot draw up climate action plans on the one hand – to keep step with international obligations or social chatter – but refuse to acknowledge climate concerns on the other.

Indeed, the 228.1 mm of rainfall in 24 hours in Delhi’s Safdarjung Observatory in June was more than three times the June rainfall average of 74.1 mm^[4] and the highest for the month since 1936. The rainfall of nearly 300 mm in barely six hours in Mumbai’s suburbs this week^[5] was many times more than what the city’s stormwater drains could handle. Such high precipitation in a short time, a repeating pattern, allows authorities to plead helplessness. The monsoon mayhem is then termed a “natural disaster”.

But let’s be honest. Is the flooding and resulting disruption of our lives, even death, natural and not human-made, deliberate? Is it not time to call this bluff out and demand that cities be built differently, built in nature? Nature does not send us an invoice, as environmental economist Dr Pavan Sukhdev put it so eloquently last year. But it does teach us hard lessons when we ignore and discount it – lessons that our authorities and planners have not yet learned. 

This leaves us, millions in cities across India, at the mercy of rain or heat. Mayhem beats magic in every rain.

Can the magic be restored?
To believe that we have lost the monsoon magic and joy forever in our cities is to lose hope that things cannot be improved. Things can be changed by all of us who believe that better cities are possible, that cities can be re-imagined in the lap of nature, built with nature, as it were, to allow water its rightful space.^[6]

First, cities need a lot more green areas in any and every form possible – public parks and neighbourhood gardens, nature parks and eco parks accessible to people, urban forests that must be identified and protected, mini-forests that can be created by arborists, green corridors along roads that have caught the public imagination in many international cities, wilderness areas within and around a city.

A focus on augmenting the green cover, which has been depleting at an alarming rate in most Indian cities, can help restore some of the natural balance and absorb the heavy downpour. The soil beneath allows water to percolate and recharge groundwater. Importantly, the green areas offer people in a neighbourhood many ways to enjoy the rainfall, rediscover the meaning of poetic phrases like the old Tamil Sangam verse “…our hearts have mingled, like the red earth and pouring rain” (Kuruntogai 40), and reconnect with many forms of life in the monsoon.

Second, cities must restore and rejuvenate their watercourses – rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, nullahs, wells and every other place that belonged to water. But do we know where our city’s watercourses are? This calls for mapping them in every neighbourhood and sharing the information on open-source platforms so that a neighbourhood’s water wealth is known to all which makes it harder for vested interests to usurp. This water network must be connected – or reconnected – at the city level so that water flows freely, especially during heavy rain. Intense rainfall can cause flooding but if natural water networks in cities are not disrupted, flooded areas can clear in minutes without pumps and such paraphernalia.

Interconnecting the watercourses also creates the space for linear parks and green corridors to be made along them. The rejuvenation of rivers has, of late, come to mean riverfront development; the current model seen in Sabarmati River and other rivers focuses on ‘development’ with construction, retaining walls, leisure and gaming areas, and more real estate. A mindshift is called for – from the riverfront to the river itself. Respect the river’s ecology, clear its course, restore its floodplains.

Three, cleaning and desilting stormwater drains – the mechanical pre-monsoon tasks – are crucial too. These are annual exercises, a matter of routine civic work. Yet, lately, municipal corporations have turned them into extraordinary or exceptional tasks, with photo-ops for politicians. These are a city’s housekeeping chores and only the bare minimum tasks to ensure that rainwater can flow out. But focusing on these and water pumps allows authorities to get away without paying adequate attention to the first two.

Four, timely and credible information is absolutely necessary to allow people to make decisions about stepping out in heavy rain. The chain of command for information – who will declare it heavy rain days as holidays, after how many hours or millimetres of rain, based on whose inputs, will this be communicated as mandatory messages to all mobiles in a city through mobile phone carriers – are all crucial to whether people are trapped outdoors in heavy rains. This information flow is sorely lacking now.

Five, interactive city broadcasts that alert people of severe rain and draw them into the fun aspects of rain may help too. Climate scientists at the University of Arizona, Michael Crimmins and Zack Guido, created the Monsoon Fantasy Forecasts in which people could wager on the amount of rainfall in each month of the southwest monsoon in the United States; this game was part of their monsoon podcast.^[7] “We are trying to bring back the enjoyment that we have in thinking about the monsoon to other people and allow them to test their knowledge too,” they said. Radio FM across India’s cities may be the platforms to explore such activities.

If cities must be built in ways around the natural pathways of water and the monsoon is acknowledged as a part of the natural ecological and climate cycles, it may still be possible to minimise flood and havoc – and bring back some of the monsoon magic.

Cover photo: Flickr