MUMBAI: THAT SINKING FEELING
For Mumbai residents, it was an all too familiar scene. Rains cutting off the metro’s lifeline (the local train services that carry 7.5 million commuters every day), inundating several parts of the city that houses thousands of homes and offices, electricity cut off in many parts, landslides sweeping away hutments, buildings collapsing, the works. Three people died in landslides, while two drowned in the flood waters, said initial reports the day after Mumbai received 315 mm of rain in 12 hours on August 29, the highest ever since the 944 mm rainfall on July 26, 2005.
Mumbai, home to Asia’s oldest stock exchange, the BSE, apart from thousands of large and small businesses, saw thousands of crores of rupees swept away in the rains, even as the Sensex crashed 362 points. “Typhoonlike weather,” tweeted industrialist Anand Mahindra, “...‘Down Under’ water in Mumbai.” But why does the city fail its residents again and again in the face of heavy rains? The reasons, too, are oft repeated, right from the rampant corruption in public works contracts to the unscrupulous builderpoliti cian nexus to archaic laws that have left the city bursting at the seams.
Most ironically, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the country’s richest civic body, has a budget of Rs 25,141 crore for 201718, higher than that of some state governments. But citizens complain they never get their due, be it civic infrastructure or hospitals or public spaces. Even when Mumbai was sinking, the two parties of the ruling coalition—the BJP and the Shiv Sena—were still blaming each other for the mess. Incidentally, the Sena is running the BMC on its own for the first time in 22 years; it has only run the civic body in coalition earlier.
The state’s disaster management cell cut a sorry figure as it failed miserably at issuing early warnings or acting efficiently in rescue operations, a responsibility citizen groups and religious sanctuaries eagerly took upon themselves. Storm water pumping stations, spruced up with Rs 400 crore, also proved utterly ineffective. The disaster helplines didn’t work either. And as Mumbai braced for more rain, it was abundantly clear that there wasn’t a simple way out of its miseries.