In Mumbai's deluge, a lesson: You can't engineer your way around water systems |
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........