T N Ninan: Do we deserve this?

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

A breakdown of such magnitude is scary. The airport closed for 48 hours, roads under waist-high water, the suburban train system paralysed, people unable to commute back home for two days and sleeping in offices or stranded on the roads, power shut off, telephone links broken, banks and stock markets closed, normal activity at a standstill.

Many have died, more than has been reported so far, and the messages to missing relatives on the TV channels tell the story of distress and fear.

The full scale of the tragedy will emerge over many days. Through all this, the majority of Mumbaikars have shown both fortitude and courage.

I have spoken to many of them, and uniformly they seem cheerful despite the extreme aggravation, demonstrating a survival and make-do spirit that is worthy of the people who have made the city the country's commercial capital.

But is this what should happen to a commercial capital? Clearly, what Mumbai experienced this past week was an extraordinary event, and you don't ordinarily plan for such eventualities.

So it is hard to quarrel with a city administration when you get rainfall levels that beat century-old records. Still, the question has to be asked: could it have been prevented? The unforgiving answer is: Yes.

Everyone who has lived and worked in Mumbai, or visited it regularly, knows that every year the rain comes down in buckets for a day or two and brings the city to a halt.

Overnight sleepovers in offices, or trudges home over many hours, become a matter of unavoidable necessity as soon as the roads get flooded and the trains stop.

It is part of the price that you pay for living in the city. It isn't usually as bad as what we have just lived through, but it happens with annual regularity.

That means fingers should indeed be pointed at the city administration.

What should it do? For a start, build all-weather traffic arteries, like the Bandra-Worli bypass over the water. Because every year it is the stretch between these two points along a narrow chicken's neck of the island that becomes impassable, isolating the commercial heartland of South Mumbai from the northern suburbs where most people live.

Alternative linkages from South Mumbai to the mainland have also been discussed over the years, both over and under water, but there has been no action.

Surely, it is time to demand a decision. Then, expand the city's stormwater drain capacities so that rainwater can be flushed out quickly, no matter how hard it comes down.

The tides do pose a problem for flushing out operations, but today's drainage system is obviously not able to cope and its capacity must be augmented.

These are not very costly exercises, when seen in the context of the money that Mumbai generates and the scale of the loss that is suffered when the city shuts down for a day.

So the residents of the city should rightly expect these investments to be made so that their lives are not disrupted every year.

There is a larger attitudinal problem here, because India's planners have neglected its cities. Delhi has been fortunate, first as a pampered capital and then as the host for periodic sports festivals.

The Asian Games of 1982 and the Commonwealth Games planned for 2010 have been provocations for significant investment in urban infrastructure.

India's other cities have not been so lucky, though they are magnets for growth. Bangalore is in many ways a boomtown, but its infrastructure scene is now a horror story.

Kolkata has been the victim of decades of neglect""and used to be the victim of regular flooding too, until they built proper drainage systems. The smaller towns are no better.

Even favoured Delhi is yet to get a bypass so that through truck traffic from north to south or east to west does not have to go into the city.

The one chief minister who understood the importance of a well-organised and functioning city was Chandrababu Naidu, who transformed Hyderabad in five years. If he could do it, surely others too can.