Why Gurugram Flooding Reflects Multi-Sectoral Failure |
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Gurugram (Haryana): It happened quickly and unceremoniously. On August 26, a sinkhole opened up on a chunk of the Delhi-Jaipur highway, on the Ifco Chowk service road. The ground simply collapsed, said eyewitnesses. There was putrid brown water and a small group of spectators. And where once stood a road – one of the city’s essential arteries – was a massive, otherworldly crater: 15 feet deep and 10 feet wide.
Workers took three days to pump out the sewage. A GMDA (Gurgaon Metropolitan Development Authority) official at the site estimated that the repair work, which entails shuttering the area around the drainage line, relining existing pipes that have been damaged, as well as replacing 20 metres of the line, will take about 15 days.
An otherwise busy road, from where a number of bus tour companies operate, has come to a standstill. Cars, trucks and buses navigate their way through the little space that is now available.
“It’s become very difficult for us. There is so much traffic, and various police and government vehicles are parked throughout the day. I now have to park my buses behind the sinkhole, or on the flyover,” said Devashish, a Flixbus worker.
Eighteen-year-old Billu, who runs a biryani stall made invisible by the GMDA’s green scaffolding, complained that “business was down” because there were no buses standing.
Sinkholes, flooded roads, rainwater drains clogged with sewage and trash, a further outpouring of sewage, citizens wading through water that is four feet high – these are the images, totems that have come to represent Gurugram, loftily known as Haryana’s Millennium City, which contributes 60% to the state’s GDP and has a BJP “triple-engine sarkar” in power. On the flipside lies a surplus of dizzying extravagance: plush apartment buildings designed to insulate their inhabitants; office complexes that serve the same purpose. Aspiration coexists alongside what is despicable. This city bereft of urban planning, whose population rose by 74% in the span of a decade, has come to serve as a hallmark for how not to build a city. Every year, residents wake up to the same urban nightmare: floods that could have been prevented.
Billu at his biryani stall. Photo: Antara Baruah
Gurugram has lost 200 water bodies
At the core of this maze of underpasses, overbridges and manic construction, lies a fact. Gurugram has lost over 200 of its water bodies. The Survey of India Records of 1976 place it as having 519 bodies. By 2018, this number had dropped to a paltry 251, squandered by the emergence and rapid development of the city.
The city’s infrastructure was originally constructed by the British: storm water drainage, the sewage, the water supply, and overall water management. This included a hundred check-dams and bunds that have mostly been built on.
These water bodies would have been crucial to flood management because they would have served as ‘sponges’, absorbers of rain water. However, despite the city’s deluge of water-related problems – floods, a depleted water table, uncontrolled use of ground water, severe shortages, rampant construction –........