The worst is over and the city of Chennai
in the State of Tamil Nadu in India is limping back to normalcy after the
unprecedented flood catastrophe of December 2015. The whole country applauds
the exceptional grit and grace with which the citizens of Chennai fought the
fury of the floods as one single family of friendly strangers! When the Indian
Armed Forces, the NDRF Battalions, the Paramilitary Forces, the State Police and
the common men intermingled with the victims of the flood-ravaged city of
Chennai on the mission to save lives, by heroic deeds they won the admiration
and gratitude of the nation as a whole. India can be justly proud of the inspiring
examples set out by the rescue teams and the citizens, in the defiance of death
and destruction. The ensuing trail of success stories, which will be retold for
generations to come, has reaffirmed peoples’ faith in India’s capacity to
manage the post-disaster phase of the cataclysmic events.
Now imagine the dreadful scenario in the
flood-ravaged Chennai without the timely and decisive interventions of the
post-disaster response teams. The loss of lives, the number of those injured, the
count of the homeless, trauma of the victims, damages to the infrastructure,
the cost of recovery and construction and pressure of demand on local administration
would have been several folds higher. On the other hand, imagine the scenario
which could have developed to our advantage after implementation of preventive
and mitigation measures in tune with the experiences gained and the lessons
learned from as many as six major flood disaster events in the last 40 years.
The loss of lives, damages to the infrastructure, the hefty relief package of
Rs 1940 crores and the astronomical sums of money now required for
reconstruction could have been drastically curtailed, if not altogether
avoided. We all know that prevention and mitigation pay and yet it is
unfortunate that those at the helm of affairs still prefer to pay for the end-of-the-pipe
solutions from the public funds at the expense of the basic human needs.
By not taking recourse to the prevention
and mitigation route, contrary to the stated policy, even the Central Government
does not do justice with its own commitment to the people of India made in the
National Disaster Management Act of 2005. The Act, which was enacted about the
same time as the last Chennai flood disaster of December 2005, had promised to
the nation a paradigm shift from the relief-centric approach to the culture of
prevention and mitigation. With ten years of lead time since the last major
flood disaster, the State Government was expected to feel the pain of disasters
and take the Act more seriously.
Another stated strategy of the Government
of India is to shift the focus from development to sustainable economic
development. The X Five Year Plan clearly mentioned that the planned
expenditure on disaster prevention and mitigation will be coupled with the
Calamity Relief Fund. There was a major shift of Focus in the XI plan which
laid emphasis on integration of disaster mitigation with development planning. If
the government would have taken its own strategy seriously, the severe flooding
of the areas surrounding Perumbakkam because of the construction of the IT
Corridor on the filled-up lake could have been avoided. The flooding of
Mudichur, Velachery, and several other areas are not a matter of surprise to
those who Chennai because they had encroached the wetlands and the river
basins. The city’s largest mall, Phoenix, is on a lake-bed — Velachery. In 1976 floods too, Adyar over-topped its
banks invading houses by several feet precisely because of the stream
encroachment.
There is no denying the fact that for
economic and infrastructure development, land has to be found. The national
challenge lies in using the land in a manner that construction and mitigation
measures are planned, designed and implemented as a single package. This should
have been done when the major bus terminal was built in the flood-prone
Koyambedu or when the Chennai airport was built on the floodplains of the River
Adyar. Building a Mass Rapid Transit System over the Buckingham Canal and
several automobile and telecom SEZs and many housing estates, over the erstwhile
water bodies, were less of engineering in development and more about the recipe
for a disaster. By hindsight, it seems clear that the government should have
walked the talk by integrating disaster mitigation with planning for
sustainable development. Reportedly over 300 water bodies have already been
lost to urbanization and construction. The 16 tanks belonging to the Vyasarpadi
chain downstream of Rettai Eri have reportedly met with a similar fate.
All the blame cannot be placed on either
the Government or the Extreme Weather Events. We the people are equally
responsible for our compromising positions when it comes to our self-interest.
Often times, we pressure administration for bending of rules and regulations
for our narrow gains. According to a report submitted by CMDA to the Madras
High Court, there are over 1.5 lakh illegal structures in the city, hazardous
also to the city drainage. When High Court ordered demolition, the people
appealed to the Supreme Court and sought stay-orders. Naturally, we need
stricter laws and swift disposal of such cases. It is high time people realize
that disasters drain our resources, sap our strength, halt the pace of economic
development, rob the posterity of India’s cultural heritage and inflict lifelong suffering on the victims,
especially in the low-income group.
Those responsible for the above acts of
omission and commission must be held accountable not only for what wrong they did,
but also for what they should have done, which they did not do. The
professionals who implemented the above projects were responsible for ensuring
that the projects themselves do not become a cause of disasters.
Since it is not in our culture to fix accountability,
the civil administration, on the predicted lines, did pre-empt inconvenient and
hard questions about public safety by declaring the Chennai 2015 floods as a natural
calamity and placed the blame entirely on unprecedented rainfall due to Climate
Change, completely ignoring the interplay of numerous other causative factors. The
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, even without any investigation, reportedly said
“Losses are unavoidable when there's very heavy rain. Swift rescue
and relief alone are indicators of a good government.” [1]
Earlier also, the Chennai floods of 1969, 1976, 1985, 1996, 1998, 2005 and 2015
were attributed to the heavy rainfall events. Does that mean that factors such
as unrestrained and unplanned urbanization, non-engineered and illegal
construction, encroachment of water bodies and low-lying areas had no role to
play? It is true that the heavy rainfall
forced authorities to release 30,000 cusecs from the Chembarambakkam reservoir
into the Adyta river over two days, causing flooding and submergence. But the
question to ask is why such situations could not have been anticipated and
provided for in project design? How can
one explain the flooding of Koyambedu and the neighbourhood other than by
concluding that the related storm water drain projects failed to account for the
built-environment, the altered urban landscape and the water logging data of
the previous cataclysmic flood events?
It
is only when the authorities ignore such ground realities and try to hide
behind the Extreme Weather Events as the sole cause that we keep working in the
comfort zones of business as usual, take recourse to the obligatory
post-disaster relief-centric approach when needed, and keep re-reaffirming our
faith in the merit of disaster prevention and mitigation , as parrots do.
There are no simple solutions to the
problems of flooding in the city of Chennai which have been allowed to develop
over the period of many decades. Instead of overlooking the wrong doings of the
past and throwing blame on heavy rainfall, the political masters, bureaucrats,
professionals, the civic officials should come out of the denial mode, own the
responsibility and concede with humility that they have failed to walk the
talk. It is time to learn from the past experiences and put institutional
mechanisms and Standing Operating Procedures in place to ensure that disaster
mitigation measures get firmly embedded in all the future project designs.
The large scale flood hazard maps and
hydrology maps of the City of Chennai should be revised on priority. The
corresponding large scale maps should clearly mark problematic areas, buildings
and infrastructure at risk. These maps should guide the revision of the second
Masterplan prepared by the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority. Both,
the hazard maps and the Masterplan should be independently peer-reviewed, and
thereafter the future flood risk scenarios should be projected with sensitivity
to Climate Change, highlighting the problem areas in the backdrop of the
experiences gained during the December 2015 flooding. The National Guidelines
on Flood Management issued by the National Disaster Management Authority in
January 2005 would need revision and adoption, mutatis mutandis.
All
the illegal constructions should be demolished by expediting pending court
cases.
Extreme Weather Events and heavy rainfall are
going to be matters of concern all the time and should not ever be taken as
unforeseen happenings. The extreme rainfall events like the one which pounded the
State of Tamil Nadu and triggered the catastrophe will have to fully accounted
for while formulating preventive and mitigation strategies. Modern technologies
should be deployed to improve weather, rain and flood forecasting.
India has an ambitious blueprint of
economic development and one of the high profile programmes is development of
Smart Cities. Ponneri of Tamil Nadu has been identified for development as a
Smart City. Hopefully, those responsible for its planning carefully study why
the airport was closed and several iconic companies had to shut their
operations. The functioning of giant software exporters like TCS, Infosys and
HCL and automobile giants like Renault Nissan, Yamaha, BMW and Ashok Leyland were
also badly affected by the floods. In the fiercely competitive world with
international commitments, India cannot afford the repeat of such sad
experiences ever again in future. An empowered High Powered Committee should be
constituted to approve the plans of Ponneri, and be accountable to the nation.
______________________________________________________
Prof RK Bhandari is a distinguished alumnus from IIT Mumbai, a Fellow of Indian National
Academy of Engineering and a recipient of the coveted Varne’s Medal for Excellence in Research and Practice of Landslides.
Praful Rao,
Kalimpong,
Dist Darjeeling
