As Chennai drowns, failures surface

It has been an extraordinary season of Northeast Monsoon rainfall in Tamil Nadu, particularly in its coastal districts, including the capital Chennai, plus Pondicherry. The worst deluge in living memory smashed several meteorological records and divided Chennai into several little islands even as its international airport shut operations and road, rail and suburban systems were thrown totally out of gear. With the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and NDRF struggling to rescue marooned people, scenes out of the city — with water flowing like angry rivers — are straight out of a Hollywood scary movie.

A measure of the horror can be gauged from the fact that parts of Chennai received 49 cm of rain in a 24-hour period ending Wednesday morning even as all major reservoirs, lakes, tanks and ponds around the city opened their “gates” to let the water out. The drains were overwhelmed to the extent that people have had to live with the terror of water in their homes that would not recede as waves of weather fronts kept forming in the Bay of Bengal and beyond to dump more and more rain on the state.

Matters may have got way out of hand in the wake of nature venting her fury in a concentrated manner on a couple of cities. The point is the monsoons are India’s lifeline without which the bare necessities of agriculture and life cannot be met. How prepared are we, even in the modern age, to cope with the challenge of extreme weather events of which we will probably only see more and more as the effects of global warming kick in? That we have not even got the basic infrastructure of our metros and cities right is testament to how poorly we have fared.

Storm water drains aligned to channels and waterways are basic requirements of  modern civilisation in which the emphasis is on urban agglomerations providing livelihoods to millions. If such basic civic systems cannot be handled by the extremely corrupt and corpulent civic corporations in any city in India, it is time they were handed out to public-private partnerships, or even outright private enterprise, so that people are not put in fear of their lives by an annual rainfall event.

Tax breaks for enterprises like private civic services must be considered if official India is proving so incapable of putting in place services and facilities in a nation that is among the quickest urbanising countries. The efficient management of cities is a national priority and independent of ideology. The free play of politics in this through local body polls and mayoral elections may serve democratic ideals but does nothing for serious issues like city infrastructure. When will we rise above narrow considerations is a rhetorical question to which few have answers.