Mumbai Rains

Today topic is Mumbai and how it is affected by rains.

From last night till today afternoon there was  moderate to heavy rains in Mumbai city, suburbs and adjoining areas. This type of rain is enough to stop the routine life of Mumbai. Such is the state of  this city during rains that even 20 mm rain fall in few hours will flood the most of the roads and today on top of this heavy rain there was one more calamity, ie one portion  fly over which was joining Andheri East and West  area caved in, and this caved in portion was exactly over the suburban  railway tracks. There were no major casualties, as per last report 5 people were injured. Actually no road portion caved in, the caved in portion was for pedestrians. An alert motorman of local train averted  a major tragedy when he applied a sudden brake to stop the train few meters before the accident spot and as per his statement he saw some thing falling on the tracks and therefore he applied an emergency brake, this happened around 7.30 in the morning. With heavy rains and this accident had a cascading affects on the life of the people staying in the western suburbs in Mumbai.

Actually after what happened on 26 July 2005 in Mumbai, even with small rain fall people are afraid to come out of the house, just because they have totally given up on Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the fact is that even with 15 mm rain in one hour roads are flooded, there is water on railway tracks, traffic is disturbed and most of the people starts leaving their place of work, as they are afraid that if there is more rain then they may not be able to reach home in the evening. When there is little heavy  rain, then first thing will be schools will start calling the parents, we are closing the school please take your child back or if the child is going by school  bus then the message will come, bus will  return at such and such time, please arrange for pick up of your child from designated bus stop.If there is little heavy rain in the earlier night, parents will get the message that school is closed today. In today’s case , students who go in the afternoon shift to schools were informed that there will be no school.

It has been happening over the years, every year BMC promises that city is rain ready, but with the first rain their promises are washed away. In my opinion following are the main causes of Mumbai’s misery during rains:

1. Storm water drains are not cleaned and cleared of  trash regularly. BMC does a eye wash job before monsoon every year but of no use.
2. Roads are not cleaned regularly and properly, even if they are cleaned , half the dirt goes to storm water drains, which in the end results in clogging the same.
3. BMC does not impart proper civic sense to their employees and citizens.
4. If you see photographs all the storm water nallahs, you will find the plastic bags floating, which are the major cause of clogging of drains. few years back Govt banned the use of thin plastic bags(less than 50 microns), but it hardly worked. Why, because before banning, govt did not suggest viable alternatives. you know recently they had banned so many plastic items including all kinds of bags, but without any viable alternative. Problem is that govt has not come out with a suitable re cycling policy for plastic items till date.
5. Mumbai’s storm water drain system was designed in good old British days, and it has a capacity of handling 50 mm of rain max in an hour, which was a good design during those days, as there was not much concretisation of city and mother earth could absorb most of the rain water. But in last 6 decades, there have been so much concretisation in the city, with all RCC structures & towers, with concrete road, you  hardly  see any mother earth now a days, so water seeping into mother earth has reduced , so all the rain water has to be catered by storm water (SW) drains, and as mentioned earlier  SW drains are clogged and which leads to flooding. Further, still there are so many areas, which do not have even proper SW drains.
6. Additionally there are so many agencies who are handling city’s development work, and I am mentioning few of them BMC, Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA), agencies who are handling metro railway work, Western and Central Railway( for suburban local trains). Like in today’s flyover cave in case, BMC  is blaming railways, as per Mayor of Mumbai, BMC is paying charges to railways to maintain the bridges which are crossing the railway tracks, and spoke person of Western Railways says that it is the job of BMC to maintain the bridge. BMC is expert in this blaming game, if there is flooding on the road now a days their statement is generally it is due the work being done by MMRDA and Metro Railway. My question is why all these agencies can not co ordinate with each other.

The list will be endless, I have pointed out certain salient points only. So moral of the story is we should have total revamp of city’s management system as present way of working has been proved to be a total failure or politicians who are in power are totally incapable of handling city’s affairs. the central govt has to really think and see how they can save commercial capital of India. Otherwise Mumbaikars,  in the coming years we might face even worse scenario.

Awaiting for your feed backs/comments/views.