Learnings from Chennai

As rescue boats retreat from the flooded streets and crocodiles return to their habitat, a pressing question remains: What about our focus on urban planning?

Stranded in Chennai, as Cyclone Michaung played its part, was all about rescheduling travel plans, coping with long hours of power cuts, and struggling to send WhatsApp messages and emails as internet connectivity turned patchy. For this writer, it was also an opportunity to observe how the many key players responded and reacted to the crisis.

Most airlines took time to inform passengers about flight cancellations on December 4, the day Chennai was knee-deep in water, even though the airport had already been announced as closed till 9 pm and then extended to 11 am the following day. The delay in the response time of the airlines was in sharp contrast with the speed with which they hiked tariffs for passengers booking the next day’s flights. While it may not be desirable to regulate tariffs in ordinary times, airlines would have earned customer goodwill if they had refrained from making a quick buck in the face of a crisis of this magnitude. A recorded call is what one got from the airlines, leaving every passenger high and dry in the rain-soaked city. Passengers had the option of refund (in most cases not fully) or plan B of rescheduling the flight. In both scenarios, passengers lost out while trying to secure a way out of Chennai, irrespective of whether it was a budget airline or a full-service one.   

In this specific case, hotels emerged as more humane, trying to accommodate people with cancelled flights without jacking up the room rates, regardless of whether the stay got extended or it was a fresh booking. If they made a killing during the World Cup final in Ahmedabad, charging in lakhs for a night, some prominent brands toned down their rates during the Chennai deluge. With everything running on generators, it didn’t matter to guests that lobbies, lounging spaces and corridors remained barely lit or that room service became a casualty. With so much uncertainty about how long the rains and airport closure could last, nothing mattered more than an assurance from hotels that they were good to go with power backup for several hours more.

But it is the day after that often tells a bigger story of resilience as well as despair. The oldest road in Chennai — Anna Salai (Mount Road earlier) — and many prominent high streets appeared to be back in business with hardly any trace of water-logging. The airport, which was inundated until a few hours ago, was ready for arrivals and departures. Baggage handling and airport security — with remarkable swiftness — didn’t show any sign of the day just gone by. Retail at the airport was yet to pick up, with many store managers having to spend the previous day and night on the airport premises. The display boards at various points in the airport still showed “cancelled” and “delayed” frequently, disappointing passengers. In many cases, planes were waiting but the crew was missing.               

However, there’s another Chennai, away from glitzy hotels and airports, that bore the real brunt of the cyclonic storm and rain. Water-logging continued even a day later, hampering life and livelihood, sending thousands to relief camps. The local administration, the cops, and the armed forces were out in the heavy rains trying to put things back on track, but who is to make amends on urban planning?

Set against the backdrop of the ongoing COP28 summit in Dubai, and coming right after the Uttarakhand tunnel saga, the devastation wreaked by  Michaung  has reopened the debate on global warming as well as the importance of urban planning. The narrative is centred around one question — what did Chennai do in eight

years since the worst deluge it faced in recent history in 2015 to make the city flood-proof? In fact, just six months ago, in June, the Tamil Nadu government released Chennai’s first Climate Action Plan. Designed to serve as a road map for the city to become carbon neutral by 2050 (much earlier than India’s plan of net zero by 2070), the action plan aims to focus on six priority areas, including urban flooding.

Chennai got its action plan in place eight years after the city’s worst deluge, which lasted for days and killed hundreds in 2015. The plan should be implemented much faster so that there’s no repeat of 2015 or 2023. Rescue boats may have moved away from the flooded streets of Chennai and crocodiles may have returned to their own habitat, but we must rethink our preparedness for natural disasters while paying attention to urban planning. Also, global warming should not remain a subject of international summits alone, and it’s not a bad idea to borrow from experiences of cities around the world for a better future of our citizens.