Several cities with superior infrastructure all over the world have been overwhelmed by nature’s fury this year. And governments of those nations have found themselves unequal to the task of facing up to the relentless assault of nature. Clearly there are limits to human effort and no limits to nature’s sweep.
Chennai is no exception. While there have been major lapses, the incumbent administration did rise to the occasion and many potential crises were averted. Roads were cleared of fallen trees quickly, power was strategically cut off for safety reasons and restored soon, and generally the authorities were quick to respond and sensitive. Of course, there is also validity in the argument that these benefits were largely confined to the heart of the city, while the suburbs presented a totally gloomy picture.
Chennai’s water woes are a legacy. From extreme scarcity to total inundation, its misfortunes have been swinging like a pendulum. The rains may be failing frequently, but it is not that Chennai is without natural infrastructure, as many believe. On the contrary, unlike other metros, the city is very well endowed with natural water storages, though hardly any water gets to be stored in them owing to shortfall in rain. It has over five hundred big and small lakes around it, besides a few waterways inside it. There are also a number of marshlands and swamps, at least on the maps. Successive administrations over the decades have added to the infrastructure to the inclusion of the most recent Rain Water Harvesting systems. Yet water, abundant or scarce, remains Chennai’s nemesis. Clearly, water management has not been a genetic virtue of this city and its citizens. In times of bounty like this year, the city is simply not in a position to both retain its water as also to withstand any flooding.
The major culprit has been the encroachments on lake embankments and water conduits, to and from the storage points. Such man-made restrictions to the free flow of water has caused all this water logging leading to large scale evacuation and all round misery. When water does not flow and becomes stagnant instead, it loses potability and becomes sewage. The loss of such water, which would otherwise have found its own safe resting place and remained usable apart, stagnant water takes days to dry and is a major cause for the outbreak of epidemics. Many of the suburbs of Chennai have now been rendered breeding grounds of disease, which in all probababiity, is the next disaster waiting around the corner.
Town planning, if at all there is any, is too short sighted and mired in politics. The city is growing both vertically and horizontally, with no parallel development of infrastructure in terms of drainage, sewerage and drinking water faciities. All our neighbourhoods have changed visibly over the years, but underground, it’s status quo. And the growth in the suburbs is very alarming. Reckless conversion of agricultural and marshlands into housing plots has already made many of those localities beyond salvage. One has to visit these places now to believe. The roads are hardly twenty feet wide with the motorable width less than ten. And of their condition, the less said the better. Most of these localities have a lake, or rather had one bordering them with the possiblity of submergence during heavy rains very high. And worse such unchecked growth continues unabated.
It is estimated that in a few decades more than half of the world population will live in cities. Urbanisation takes two forms: People from rural areas migrating and small towns getting engulfed by metros or becoming cities themselves. But whatever, urban infrastructure to cope with the booming population is a challenge that many countries, particularly in the third world, have already woken up to in right earnest. More so, because cities are the showcases to draw in FDIs and businesses. Massive rains have already punctured the reputations of Mumbai and Bangalore. Of course, Chennai did not have much to boast of in the first place. But let alone parading as a world metro, Chennai and its denizens, that includes its politicos, need to shake off their blissful ignorance and cultivated complacence, put their heads together, take the help of experts, use both hindsight and foresight, if only to remain afloat. Otherwise, next time around, the now stinking city would also sink.