A few relatively dry days and Chennai is just about livable for most of its citizens now. Of course, our hearts do go out to those whose lives have been disrupted by all the water that refuses to drain out so that they can get back home and resume living where they are bound to be most comfortable. And then there are the people who have lost kin to the rain and the flash floods, a tragedy difficult to digest.
The bigger question is whether a city go to pieces each time it rains hard for a few days. Chennai has had nearly 900 mm of rain so far this year, with 415 mm falling in the northeast monsoon season, which according to the Met office is well above the normal for the month. Of course, there has been no recurrence of the November 15 phenomenon of cloudburst-like conditions in which 212 mm fell on a single day. The city has been rendered so flood-weary no one should invite more rain from a cyclonic storm, which some forecasters are not ruling out yet this season.
The Facebookwallahs and Twitettari have been having a fun time already even bringing up a joke about a monkey wedding said to have been held in the state during the dry season to invite rain and how the perpetrators are now hunting for the simian pair to request them to file for divorce. There have been nice memes about how Chennai goes from Sahara in the summer to Venice in the rain to Ooty in the winter.
Not that Chennai has a winter but the conditions of December and January are the best possible weather when the heat is down and the humidity is low, twin blessings that are all too rare. The only problem is a few thousand people will not be joining us with as much enthusiasm in welcoming the wintry conditions because there is still floodwater in and around their houses to reckon with. While flash flooding is a worldwide phenomenon during rainy seasons, excessive waterlogging is clearly a manmade disaster.
Hydrological planning is a scientific concept. Maybe, that is why it is abhorrent for the city’s developers who see money in each square foot of the Floor Space Index they can build on. The CMDA is beholden to the builder lobby, which is the reason why nothing will happen between now and the next big monsoon that brings rain rather than the wind that cyclones tend to bring. The high court may have been seized of the matter, but the honourable judges are not engineers. They can only suggest that the civil engineers get their act together. This is a country notorious for its lackadaisical attitude towards civic work, roads, etc.
Over the last few years the city has spent in excess of Rs 10,000 crores on drains. This process of renewing, redesigning and rebuilding a drainage system that is more than 150 years old and left in our town as a legacy of the British is not the most efficacious as has been made so obvious by its failures this monsoon. The illegal connections to the drains are not the only problem. The two rivers and the major canal which carry the excess water can carry only so much and no more. The heart of the problem lies in the unplanned expansion of the city across wetlands, marshland, lake beds and waterways. This we owe to decades of corruption involving the politician-bureaucrat-planner- civic body engineer and babu nexus.
Cities expand all over the world but the outlying suburbs, or exurbs or satellite towns as they are called, are properly planned with roads and drains being the first priority rather than blocks of apartment buildings., which are essentially just modern ghettos of an industrialised world. The lesson to be learned from the fury of the 2015 Northeast monsoon is we have to be better prepared in the future as more such freakish rainfall phenomena are likely to occur, El Nino or no El Nino.
As the “Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head” song goes - But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turnin’ red / Cryin’s not for me / ‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complainin’ / Because I’m free / Nothin’s worryin’ me.”
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