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With the Yamuna River rising to a 45-year record high in Delhi and cities across northern India facing floods this week, experts say using natural solutions such as creating green areas along rivers, timely silting up of drains, making sidewalks porous and ensuring accountability Officials, cities can mitigate the situation.
National Institute of Urban Affairs director Hitesh Vaidya said reducing stormwater runoff and increasing water retention within neighbourhoods, natural solutions such as increasing former roofs and creating “green sponges” along drains and rivers were among the solutions. He added that if planning tools are applied effectively and there is a single authority to be held accountable, “risks can be minimized”.
“We have the engineering solutions. It’s a change in approach to governance that needs to be implemented. We know what we’re doing, but ‘who’ and ‘whom’ must be defined. For me, drainage is a governance challenge rather than an engineering problem. How will multiple governance issues and effective convergence work at the city level? You will decide the transition.
For example, he said the Seventy-fourth Amendment, which gives powers to municipal corporations, needs to be reconsidered. The mayoral term was not standardized across the cities, with some having terms of up to one year and others of three years. Vaidya said extending the mayor’s term to five years should be considered in order for there to be one person responsible for implementation. “At the city level, we need to know where the responsibility stops,” he said.
“We need to make tough decisions today, otherwise we will lose the transformation plot,” Vaidya said.
Professor Kapil Gupta, from the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and an expert who has worked on some of the national guidelines on urban flooding, said cities need to plan for weather extremes because they are here to stay. precipitation sensors and alarms; Planting greenery on the rooftops. making sidewalks from porous materials; rainwater harvesting; He said that defining low-lying areas to be used as ponds or gardens in the event of floods was among the mitigation measures cities should adopt.
There is a need for the government to take into account that we cannot wish for extremist events to go away. Extreme events are here to stay and we must plan for them. It is expected that the next flood will be greater than the flood that occurred yesterday.
Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has clearly stated over the past few years that precipitation and its frequency will increase.
“Today, even areas around New York have been flooded, so this is a global problem. When drainage systems were designed 50 years ago, no one thought the intensity of rainfall would increase. It was based on historical flood data. Before the 2005 Mumbai floods, average rainfall The record rainfall is 550 mm per day.”After that, it was 944 mm per day,” Professor Gupta said.
Due to the pressures of urbanization, he said, cities were built in low-lying areas, even on water bodies, blocking drainage paths. Another issue he referred to was the plurality of power.
“In Delhi, the Minto Bridge gets flooded every year. Ten years ago, I did an exercise and proposed a solution to the Delhi government. The flooded area then was under MCD, the water comes from the area under NDMC and the bridge is from the railways. We need to collect the three agencies together until the solution works.”
He added that there is no dearth of guidelines for cities to follow. “All the guidelines, rules and manuals are already there. There are NDMA Urban Flood Guidelines, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ Guidelines on Stormwater Drainage System and the Indian Roads Conference Guidelines on Urban Drainage. If cities implement this, we will be more prepared for the next extreme event.”
Parul Agarwala, Country Program Manager for UN-Habitat in India, noted that while urban flooding in the past few years has resulted in cities being better prepared, there has been significant unevenness in terms of response by different cities.
“While experienced urban local authorities in cities like Mumbai have established flood response protocols and advanced measures such as sensor-based early warning systems, cities are still learning how to deal with urban flooding. Unfortunately, the immediate shock of a flood event tends not to Translating into an integrated policy response could really make cities “resilient,” she said.
She said that while the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) was providing funding to seven major cities as part of the finance committee’s appropriations, the cities needed to take the lead.
“The policy response must adapt to the rapid changes caused by climate change and embed itself in people and communities. While traditional ‘gray infrastructure’ such as storm drains are important, recent flood events increasingly show the limitations of the silo approach.”
She added that there is a need not only for conventional interventions but nature-based solutions such as increasing permeable areas and green cover.
“Above all, the policy change needed to address urban flooding cannot be separated from the day-to-day decisions of the city. It must be integrated into core aspects of city management such as land use, building permits, hydrological management, etc.,” said Agarwala.
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