Booming population, record floods
Surat sits a mere 13 m above sea level, with the Tapi river and a network of creeks flowing through it. It is vulnerable to flooding. Now, the effects of the climate crisis are being felt too. In 2006, a deluge combined with high tides to inundate 80% of Surat for four days. It was the third major flood in 12 years, in a city that saw 20 notable floods in the century preceding. “With every 1 degree rise in temperature, we should expect a 7% intensification of extremes,” says Udit Bhatia, a climate scientist working on critical infrastructure resilience at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) - Gandhinagar.
As the city works to build a resilience plan, it doesn’t help population is booming. The city, a hub of the lucrative diamond and textile trades, has one of the fastest-growing populations of any city in India. It jumped from 2.4 million to 4.4 million between 2001 and 2011, according to census figures — a rise of over 50% at a time when the national average was 17%.
What does the resilience plan look like? In 2008, Surat was one of 10 Asian cities (two others from India were Gorakhpur and Indore) selected to join the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network, a joint effort to develop strategies for the years ahead. Under it, the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) set up the Surat Climate Change Trust, with climate experts and researchers on board to help analyse patterns and predictions, strategise and help formulate mitigation plans, especially for flooding.
“One of the finest projects that we worked on was establishing an early flood warning system, with the help of IIT-Delhi, in 2013,” says Kamlesh Yagnik, a founder trustee of the Surat Climate Change Trust and chief resilience officer with the SMC. “Of course, it requires continuous fine-tuning, because every year newer real-estate developments take place.”
The city has other projects in the works. One is a proposed 68-hectare biodiversity park, an urban forest that would act as a lung of the city. The other is a proposed water plaza, an idea borrowed from the Netherlands. “It is essentially a multipurpose, transit storage space, with provisions to store water during heavy inflow, until it can be pumped out,” says Yagnik. “At other times, the same space can be used for community engagement, sports, as a park also.”
If maintained and sustained right, these initiatives could certainly add to the local mitigation efforts, especially in reducing urban heat island effect, says Bhatia.
Meanwhile, construction continues along the banks of the Tapi. A report filed by retired justice BC Patel, former chief justice of the Delhi high court, before the National Green Tribunal, reads: “The law pertaining to Land Acquisition has not been followed, the land was not acquired and the land appears to have been allowed to develop.”