At least four people died in Pune city due to flash floods last week. The situation had turned so bad that the army and the NDRF had to be called out to rescue stranded residents of Pune’s low lying areas.
From May 15 till July 25, 2024, at least 94 people have died in different parts of Maharashtra due monsoon related calamities such as lightning strikes, landslides, tree falls, floods or structural collapses; four people went missing and 145 people have been injured. 241 people have been evacuated so far in the State.
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Thane, Raigad, Pune, Palghar, Navi Mumbai and Mumbai were worst hit. Even Panjim is witnesses to flooding due to heavy rains. All these areas are urban settlements, bursting to its seams.
Urban floods have become a regular phenomenon every monsoon in the country. Global climate change has made things worse.
The term urban floods refer to instances when a city receives massive levels of water due to heavy precipitation or other causes (such as rapid snowmelt or a storm surge caused by a cyclone or tsunami), which leads to the submergence of parts of or the entire city, and is coupled with the inability of the city infrastructure to drain the water quickly enough (or deal with it in other ways) to prevent inundation.
Climate change and rising temperatures have intensified the overflow of rivers and lakes, snowmelt, storm surges (such as hurricanes and cyclones), and abnormally heavy rains. This, coupled with locational vulnerabilities, have resulted in increased instances of urban flooding.
Pune’s Shivajinagar area recorded the third highest 24-hour rainfall in July in 66 years. With Goa recording a total of 235mm rainfall in a single day, July 8 emerged as the wettest day this season. Earlier, this season’s wettest day was June 8, when 95.1mm mm of rainfall was recorded within 24 hours. Panjim city was completely flooded with water, causing severe hardships to the residents.
Flood incidents disrupt normal life, cause economic dislocation, destroy infrastructure and may even result in the loss of lives. In recent decades, many Indian cities, both big and small, have had to contend with flood incidents, with larger cities such as Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bengaluru facing floods nearly every year.
In the 2021 version of its annual report on the impacts of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that rising temperatures will result in increased and intense monsoon precipitation across South Asia, including India. With the impact of global warming getting severe with every passing year, monsoon rains are intensifying and adversely impact human life.
Cities are witnessing more such bursts of rain, and their current drainage systems cannot cope.
Constant encroachments of riverbanks, continuous reclaiming of coastal land results in heavily clogged drainage systems and a dysfunctional storm water system that leaves little outlet for rainwater. Lakes in many cities have been filled up for building huge commercial and residential structures, open spaces are concretised.
But despite the regular phenomenon of heavy rains and flooding, our administration does not seem to learn from the disasters. Rampant constructions continue as we suffer from unplanned growth of our towns and cities.
The warning signals continue to get ignored and nature keeps getting destroyed.
Rise in migration of people from rural and semi-urban areas to bigger cities due to skewed economic growth of various States in the country is forcing the cities and towns to continuously expand horizontally, eating up into the tree cover.
This situation is getting compounded by the rising greed and corruption among the political leadership and the bureaucracy. Their hobnobbing with the builder lobby is leading to constant alteration of the development plans and more green cover is getting consumed at the cost of rapid concretisation of the settlements across the country.
According to the World Urbanisation Prospects 2018, India’s urban population is projected to reach 60% by 2050. This surge in urbanization has given rise to sprawling concrete jungles, reshaping the landscape and affecting various aspects of life.
One of the significant impacts of concrete jungles is on human health. The rise of pollution levels in urban areas poses a severe threat to respiratory health. The concentration of particulate matter and pollutants emitted by vehicles and industries in these urban landscapes contributes to respiratory ailments, with a notable increase in cases of asthma and other respiratory disorders. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), around 90% of the world’s population breathes air that exceeds WHO guidelines for air quality.
Furthermore, the rapid expansion of concrete jungles leads to a decline in green spaces. Parks and open areas, essential for physical and mental well-being, are gradually disappearing. The disappearance of such spaces in urban environments contributes to an increase in stress levels among the population, apart from flooding instances.
Our planning mechanism has to focus more towards striking a balance between economic and social development, with the preservation of the local environment.
