Flood policy needs complete overhaul

India must learn from the ecological pioneers and carefully adapt the learnings to our own conditions

As the frequency and intensity of floods have increased in India, the immediate reflex is to place the blame squarely on climate change. But the alteration in the distribution and intensity of rainfall over the past three decades places an even greater burden on policy-makers to initiate long overdue reforms, through which we can avoid and mitigate the worst impacts of extreme rainfall events.

The central focus of flood policy in India has been engineering solutions. Apart from large dams, India has constructed 35,000 km of embankments parallel to rivers in their floodplains. But the problem has only got worse over