A City Undone: Joining the Dots of Delhi’s Drainage Debacle
The 2024 monsoon in India has resulted in widespread death, damage, and loss of property, intensifying a trend seen over the past 2-3 years where urban flooding has almost become endemic in many regions. Landslides have taken a heavy toll, leaving once pristinely beautiful landscapes scarred. When things begin to happen that are far removed from what is considered normal – destroying lives, including those of animals and birds native to an area, as well as decimate hard won properties and desecrate landscapes – some might take it as fate’s vagaries, but worried citizens should begin to join the dots. Some of the more mundane causes – such as the failure to desilt urban drains, excessive paving over of our cities, unchecked urban sprawl with unauthorised constructions on former farmlands or lake beds – or even major causes like gouging the fragile Himalayas to build pilgrimage-oriented highways, irresponsible development in the equally fragile Western Ghats in Kerala, with mining activities alongside heavy tourism-oriented constructions, and unthinking riverfront concretising “developments” in many riverside towns or cities – are all very easy for an informed layperson to spot. However, there may be other, unobvious causes that may be escaping us that worsen matters. Some of these could be assumed as the root causes of the Delhi floods this year that not only led to loss of possessions but also claimed lives. The imputed cost in man-hours of time lost in stalled traffic, or street-side next to one’s car with a flooded engine, is yet to be calculated and would possibly yield a mind-boggling figure. The advent of monsoon, once an eagerly anticipated event in this city and country – with a whole sub-sections of semi-classical music devoted to extolling its virtues – has now become a dreaded season of loss and woe. However, when we consider our own local areas within Delhi, the relative lack of change in many parts of the city might not seem to provide a sufficient explanation for the increasing local flooding year after year. Maintenance and repair have never been the strong suit of our authorities, and urban sprawl has continued unchecked for decades. Taking the example of Vasant Kunj and its surroundings, which I have known for about 30 years, relatively little has changed here. If anything, there have been marked improvements – citizen bodies have led greening drives, removed paving around many trees to allow rainwater percolation, and preserved all parks and open spaces, with which this locality and its environs are richly endowed by the master planners. In fact, these spaces have been enhanced over the last few decades, as seen in the development of Sanjay Van, with its large new interconnected natural water filtration and percolation bodies, the Aravalli Biodiversity Park established a couple of decades ago, and the more recent Neela Hauz project. Other than being built on the water-absorbing and conserving Aravalli Ridge, Vasant Kunj’s natural elevation lies well above areas to the north towards the Yamuna and should naturally drain. Yet, flooding in Vasant Kunj and its environs seems to have increased over the past few years. Geological map of Delhi. Photo: Chatteerjee et al 2009 Delhi, over the last few years, has seen unprecedented flooding of Rajpath and its very green, water-absorbing environs – which lie a mere 2 kms upslope from the river – the floods this year even reached Lutyens’ Delhi, impacting homes set in large gardens housing senior legislators. This year’s record rains led to water ingress and significant damage to personal belongings in homes across diverse localities, sparing no one – from the tony, verdant Golf Links and park-endowed Defence Colony (also just a few kms upslope from the river) to the dense, congested areas of Dakshinpuri and Yamuna paar. Ingress of this magnitude has never occurred in the worst of monsoons since these localities were inhabited more than five to seven decades ago. Additionally, very low-density upscale localities like Friends Colony West, a stone’s throw from the river, now experience damaging floods. Considering that all these areas in larger central Delhi, east of the ridge, lie on a riverine drainage plain that naturally slopes towards the river, the events of this year seem to defy all logic. Additionally, each and every road in Delhi seems to get flooded even during moderately heavy rains, ruining car engines, stalling traffic and causing at least a stray death or three in flooded under-passes or illegal basement libraries. Flooding destroyed government officials’ cars parked in the basements of their new flats at New Kidwai Nagar. The old, low-scale government housing in the same location never saw such a thing. Additionally, the frequent flooding of the new Pragati Maidan underpass – which connects to the New Bharat Mandapam’s massive 40 acre underground parking basement – throws the massive flow of Delhi to Noida traffic that has taken to using it, out of kilter for miles around. It may be time Delhi’s residents began to join the dots, especially if they aren’t among those who can escape to live elsewhere when this city’s infrastructure totally collapses, like its air quality already has. A list of additions to our cityscape over the last few decades – The metro: whose arrival we all welcomed, and that undoubtedly saves many hours of commuting time while reducing carbon emissions and polluting fumes of thus avoided road traffic. But in many stretches, the metro runs deep underground while in others it has led to the hard asphalt paving over of previously water absorbing open space to provide for parking lots and pedestrian approach. – The rampant densification of relatively inner city lands as part of the G.P.R.A. (Government Pool Residential Accommodation) redevelopment, which encompasses vast tracts of south-central Delhi, including Kidwai Nagar, Naoroji Nagar, Netaji Nagar, and Sarojini Nagar, among others. These areas once featured rainwater-absorbing open spaces with slightly shabby, low-density government housing, where a few thousand now-dead trees used to flourish but now have massive buildings with double and triple basements. – The ill-conceived Central Vista project, which attempts to aggregate nearly 60,000 government employees into the heart of this beleaguered capital, has not only broken rules and shattered precedents but also caused 1,838 magnificent water sequestering trees to be removed in just the first phase. These trees, on the erstwhile I.G.N.C.A. campus, that now houses three of 10 proposed office buildings, were part of an inviolable deemed forest. What is worse, a third of the erstwhile Rajpath’s water percolating lawns have been paved to make way for parking space after the removal of another 70 trees. We have just seen the tragicomic spectacle of flooding within our venerated parliament premises, possibly thanks to the extensive hard paving around a huge new parliament building that replaces the green areas of what was once an inviolable park in the master plan of Delhi, from which we have lost 404 venerable trees. – The equally ill-conceived Bharat Mandapam on Pragati Maidan, which could have come up anywhere on the city’s outskirts and possibly rejuvenated some neglected peri-urban area, needlessly replaced what was already an exposition centre in use. The project not only resulted in the demolitions of the Hall of Nations, one of India’s most significant and internationally acclaimed modern heritage buildings, but also led to massive paving over of a once relatively verdant soft scape. To make matters worse, the city’s bureaucrats and planners, while rushing through the afore-mentioned adjacent and allied Pragati Maidan underpass, forgot to plan adequate drainage for it. The result: an annually flooded, and thus useless, underpass which connects to the Mandapam’s flooded 40-acre basement which, coupled with the increased paving, effectively stops all rain water percolation over that vast area. One only has to examine the site on Google Earth to know this. Google Earth view of Bharat Mandapam campus. Photo: Author provided. – The newly proliferating traffic underpasses, such as the massive and long-delayed Ashram underpass, constructed in areas with high water tables. If we consider that traffic underpasses, like the one at Minto Bridge, used to flood every year, it seems we are only adding to the problem by building half a dozen more each year. It is happening most likely because no other expedient solution presents itself to the city’s planners for accommodating the increasing car and two-wheeler traffic, which is driven by growing population pressure. This population increase is itself a result of the utter neglect of the hinterlands and rural areas, causing the poor to swarm into the city in search of a living—no matter how miserable. Additionally, young educated people in need of jobs crowd into the city because few second-tier cities offer adequate or well-compensated employment, while this one still might. – The recent planning permissions, given with poorly concealed avarice to make money off developers, in hitherto open farmlands, to be developed as hotels and elaborately constructed wedding venue complexes. Now complete with acres of hard-paved parking along all roads radiating out of Delhi to neighbouring towns, these lands once served as a sponge for rain water. The same planning bodies now envisage one-acre “farms” – a misnomer for lavish, paved suburban homes that replace real farmlands – and are also busy rezoning the Green Belt of agricultural land, that once surrounded this city as a buffer, into high-rise residential areas. This Green Belt was originally designed by our first master planners, who adopted the best practices of the vilified Angrez in their London master plan. Instead of creating a vast, continuous paved urban sprawl, they could have developed new areas in more distant hinterlands within and outside the NCR, seeding new sub-cities and employment opportunities, separated from the inner city by open percolation spaces and connected by high-speed commuter lines, as seen in cities like Hong Kong with similar vast open hinterlands. Delhi’s drainage patterns Let us now segue into the hydrology and drainage patterns of the New Delhi region West of the Yamuna. As visible in the map above, the Delhi Ridge arcs around the central and southern parts of the city – from the Northern Ridge near Delhi University to Rashtrapati Bhavan and the diplomatic area in the West, through Vasant Kunj in the Southwest, and all the way to Asola Bhatti and Tughlakabad in the East. This curve contains almost all of the affected areas mentioned above and is a large riverine alluvial basin plain, hemmed in by the elevated ridge from almost three sides, and sloping towards the river. It is not stretching imagination to believe that, as with surface water, there is possibly massive subterranean flow throughout this region towards the Yamuna. And now one begins to connect the dots: could it be that the many underground interventions over the last two decades are acting as underground dams, blocking the flow from the Ridge to the Yamuna, exacerbating what the gradual increase in paved, hard-scape areas have already done? New Delhi metro routes. First the underground metro lines crossing the central NDMC area, aka Lutyens’ Delhi, albeit West of India Gate. Have the Pragati Maidan underpass and Bharat Mandapam’s huge basement effectively encircled the area restricting the flow, with the pedestrian underpasses of the Central Vista under Rajpath adding to it? This may explain the floods on Rajpath, the New Parliament, the Mandapam basement, the underpass itself, Bhairon Marg etc, but probably with effects stretching till recently flooded Golf Links which is anyway hemmed in by the metro on its East? The residents of Greater Kailash Part II, otherwise on the water soaking ridge, can easily correlate the construction of Delhi metro’s underground Magenta Line to the unprecedented flooding of basements of their homes. That the new King’s Court apartment complex in this locality – built squarely over an ancient drainage channel as per an informed source – recently had the thick concrete of its basement raft slab bulging remarkably, shows the sheer power of the restricted subterranean water, as does the similarly bulging concrete in the underground parking lot of one of Aerocity’s hotels. The flooded basements of the New Kidwai Nagar government housing towers, overlooking one of Delhi’s major junctions at AIIMS, are more easily explained now. They probably act as a dam for subterranean water flow from the the Ridge at the Diplomatic Enclave to the Yamuna, and shoddy National Buildings Construction Corporation (NBCC) supervised construction has done the rest to allow in the deluge. The residents of Friends Colony West and Defence Colony, for the first time this year, saw rainwater enter the ground floors of their homes, destroying heirloom furniture and prized old carpets. While the Defence Colony residents blame the covering of the central Kushak nahar, now popularly called a nallah for obvious reasons, which is a major tributary of the drainage channel of Delhi, the Barapullah nahar. The former now probably lies choked in its invisibility and rendered inaccessible. Shockingly, no environmental clearance was ever received for covering it. Could the Ashram flyover this year have compounded the issues caused by the nahar’s choking by providing yeat another easterly dam? Is it possible that neither the current administration – in its numerous infrastructure and land monetisation projects over the last decade – nor the previous administration, before initiating projects like the underground metro, ever commissioned a study to understand the city’s overall hydrology and geology? Such a study would have identified what could be done within the city, what should be avoided, and, if necessary, alternative methods to address critical issues. The last decade alone has seen major infrastructure and construction carried out by a government that prides itself on “getting work done” to achieve “world class” infrastructure. The metro is supposed to have taken good care, at least on paper, running deep enough to at least not impede immediate subsurface flow, with inspection wells around at least each station to be able to study sub-soil water levels, according to the very informed domain expert source. Although, he wryly agreed that since we, as a nation, are not known for construction quality prowess or adherence to the written rule book, it is anyone’s guess whether everything actually works as originally conceptualised. What system of checks and balances did the system have to ensure the citizen’s interests could be protected from the vagaries of politicians and their ever-willing bureaucrats who neither dare nor care to state possibly better informed perspectives? Could this have been prevented? It so happens that India has a system to prevent such ‘development’ which may have a negative impact on the environment and ecology in the long run. Since 1994, environmental impact assessments (EIAs) have been mandated under the Environmental (Protection) Act of 1986 –updated in 2006 and 2020 – which covers every large-scale developmental intervention, including the infrastructure projects in question here. This much-acclaimed legislation was designed to protect our environment, both urban and rural, from the shortsightedness and venality exhibited by our planners, bureaucrats and politicians, and to prevent potential disasters. The policy calls for multidisciplinary impact assessment studies to be carried out by domain experts in fields as varied as geology, hydrology and seismic studies to social impact, traffic impact, pollution related factors and innumerable other factors that could result from every ill-conceived infrastructure project. It also requires the government to hold public hearings, allowing potentially affected citizens to voice their concerns. These hearings are intended to give project proponents the opportunity to address these concerns with hard facts or to modify the proposal based on highly localised, experience-based knowledge. Implicit in the requirement for these EIAs is the need for ground-truthing of available maps, which should be updated to reflect current circumstances using geospatial mapping tools that have supposedly been available for nearly two decades as part of the National GIS Mission. “The Indian experience with Environmental Impact Assessment began…in 1976-77 when the Planning Commission asked the Department of Science and Technology to examine the river-valley projects from an environmental angle. This was subsequently extended to cover those projects, which required the approval of the Public Investment Board. Till 1994, environmental clearance from the Central Government was an administrative decision and lacked legislative support. On 27 January 1994, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MEF), Government of India, under the Environmental (Protection) Act 1986, promulgated an EIA notification making Environmental Clearance (EC) mandatory for expansion or modernisation of any activity or for setting up new projects listed in Schedule 1 of the notification,” writes the Centre for Science and Environment. By this logic, every one of the projects in discussion here should have been subjected to rigorous, multidisciplinary and in-depth studies studying its impact both in the short and long term. Studies and analyses of topography, geology, hydrology and local ecology, other than surrounding habitation patterns, traffic impacts and many other such things affected by any large project should have been conducted. However, the dangers posed by the political establishment are evident. For example, the Rajasthan Wildlife Board went as far as allowing mining in a protected sanctuary to further sandstone supplies for the Ayodhya Ram Mandir, while the Union government moved to allow commercial mining of all kinds within reserve forests without even consulting local communities – a policy currently under reconsideration. How reliable are EIAs? Citizens would therefore place their trust on the EIA’s efficacy alone and believe that the independent experts who comprise the EIA committee would watch out for them. However, like most things in India, well-framed norms are largely observed in breach, including when it comes to the quality of data given to agencies preparing EIAs or even other government reports. Nearly 10 years ago, scientists at IIT-Delhi were commissioned by the Delhi government to prepare a Drainage Master Plan for the Union territory. However, it was discovered that no actual comprehensive, cogent and coordinated maps of the terrain of Delhi are available with either the Union or Delhi government. Moreover, the government was not willing to spare funds to enable actual ground-truthing of maps which, currently, show natural drainage channels flowing from lower elevations to higher ones and depict drainage channels as disconnected lines instead of tributaries that join together and flow into the Yamuna through well known drain channels like the Barapullah Nahar. Any geospatial mapping done or available is exclusively the one that maps private properties to levy property tax. And thus the Drainage Report submitted by IIT-D is full of caveats to state that these are their best discernible findings, adding that the data they received was incomplete. “It is important to convey that under some situations, recourse to interpolation, engineering judgement, etc. was taken to make the data worthy of simulation,” the report says. The report goes on to add, “It is possible that many of the data elements, that have not been independently validated by the respective departments, may be different on ground than the digital reality captured and used in the model”. And noting that “the administrative authority of the capital’s drainage system is quixotically distributed amongst numerous civic bodies and various constituent departments of Government of NCT of Delhi as well as Government of India…It is indeed noteworthy that while water logging is a frequent occurrence in the NCT of Delhi, the various agencies responsible for management of the storm water drainage neither follow the practice nor are they mandated by legislation to prepare formal records of the extent of inundation reported from various parts of the capital territory. ” From this, the common citizen can easily discern that no one truly knows, or cares, how this city actually drains now, especially after the proliferation of unauthorised constructions over vast areas. As a result, instead of relying on Indian agencies and our best educational institutions – who may tell the truth about the data they receive, as well as the speciousness of the project proposal – the government prefers to pay eight-digit US dollar fee to multinational agencies to prepare highly dubious EIA Reports based on inadequate data. These reports are designed to please the government that commissions them. No bureaucrat dares to contradict their political masters, and the resultant assessment, on the basis of which the project is passed. An example of this is the report concerning Sarojini Nagar Redevelopment, which shockingly described the locality as situated on the Punjab and Haryana border. The “drainage map” shows disjointed channels lying around at odd angles all over Delhi, none connecting to the Yamuna, and little dots representing habitations make the city seem just a little more populated than the Thar desert. The reports lists “villages around the site” cited to be faraway parliament street and Connaught Place. The report claims that “there will be no change in land use,” despite the project envisioning around 600 shops in a mall and large commercial buildings among the housing high-rises. While 11,000 trees have been cut or transplanted for this single GPRA scheme, the EIA report casually mentions that there will be “some clearing of vegetation in order to prepare the site for construction.” This is a synonym for slow killing trees in Delhi as barely 20-30% of transplanted trees survive, according to the government’s own admission. This clearly shows that these compliant agencies are not just ‘yes men’ but thoroughly incompetent as well. At a time when there is growing awareness of changing climate and the likelihood of even more extreme weather events in the future, it seems time that we need to urge governments to pause and course correct their expedient endeavours, that we too may have unthinkingly applauded. However, there is a section of our society today that views any criticism of governmental “development” plans as being of “leftist” persuasion and “anti-development.” The debate between conservation on the one hand, and expedient “development” or resource extraction on the other, is indeed a contested area. However, while it is in the nature of modern humans to be extractive, a wise person would look to the future. Such a person would forsake methods that yield only 1% of their gold in a mine while the rest is washed away as sludge, and would instead explore more efficient extraction methods that not only keep themselves and their immediate kin in luxury for their lifetime but also leave enough for their proverbial “next seven generations.” It may be time for us, as citizens, to connect the dots of current events and do what we can as it is our own lives and property at stake. Narayan Moorthy is an architect and principal at Kumar Moorthy & Associates based in New Delhi.