Rain days

Mumbai Municipal Commissioner Jairaj Pathak seems to have a brilliant mathematical mind. He also has his facts and figures – as local parlance so pithily puts it – at his fingertips. The last three days has given Mumbai 10 per cent of the season’s average rainfall which, according to Pathak’s numerical wisdom, means that 10 per cent of the city’s monsoon worries are over. Now all we need to worry about is the remaining 90 per cent.

But that 90 per cent is occupying about 100 per cent of the Mumbaikar’s mind these days. After all, one day of rain threw Mumbai’s various mechanisms out of gear. Trains were stalled, roads were flooded, walls collapsed and short circuits abounded. To cap the list of disasters, in a brilliant stroke of irony the Bombay Municipal Corporation’s heritage office building in South Mumbai had leakage and flooding problems, on the sixth floor that too, where accumulated files had to be covered with plastic to avoid data being damaged by water dripping in. The same plastic that shelters pavement dwellers and road-crews alike. Through the weekend, at each high tide, the areas of the city prone to flooding became mini-lakes as the rain fell persistently. Workmen stood in often-thigh-deep water, trying to pump away the flood and clear the choked gutters of the rubbish that prevented efficient drainage. The emergency clean-up services worked, but they should not have been needed at all.

Who is to accept the blame for what happened? The Municipal Commissioner insisted that promises have been kept – the city’s sewers have been cleared of muck, the roads repaired, potholes filled, railway tracks de-silted and the storm water drains cleaned and refurbished. The flooding, he said, is because of the basic structure of Mumbai’s drainage system – it is too old and not extensive enough to cope with a population that has increased so-many-fold since it was originally built. As a result, when the tide comes in, water cannot drain out and collects, causing traffic disruptions, hampering pedestrian movement and resulting, in a few unfortunate cases, in death. An excuse we hear every year.

The roads are being repaired, some relaid, but the rains came two days before schedule, disrupting progress, he reported. But he could not explain why, in so many instances, digging up road surfaces to concretise whole stretches of major arteries began just before the rain did. He also – albeit in passing, perhaps knowing that nothing will come of it - blamed the civic sense of the local people: accumulated garbage accounts for a great deal of the waterlogging, on roads and railway lines.

But the plain truth is that what has happened over just two days of rain is frightening if it is a prelude to a three-month-long monsoon. How much more damage will a sustained and much heavier downpour produce? And, even with the paranoia of fairly recent memory to prevent a recurrence of July 26th, 2005, can Mumbai manage to survive another such disaster? With such hard-working and responsible civic officials at the helm and with an urban disaster management system as the one Mumbai now has so firmly in place, it seems highly unlikely.