Drowning Delhi

Mumbai reeling under torrential rains is one thing; for the Capital, where monsoon is scanty, to go under is pathetic

Delhi is clearly caught in a crossfire between multiple authorities and agencies fighting for territorial rights and responsibilities as its civic amenities become anonymous fatalities, unacknowledged and uncared for. If the garbage pile-up in the city was not enough — the Supreme Court had to intervene to fix clean-up as a duty of the L-G in the tussle between him and the Chief  Minister — the season’s first monsoon shower unleashed a flood of woes that ground the Capital to a halt in a matter of hours. The drainage system was sluggish compared to the swirling rainwater, the sewers overflowed, the runoff from swanky flyways and culverts formed pools around the approaches while main arterial roads were submerged. Traffic predictably crawled and choked and the metro sputtered with excess. Meanwhile, all the bridges, old and dodgy ones like the Minto bridge or the new and hastily constructed Barapullah, held on barely against the tide, by chance escaping a cave-in. As the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and LG Anil Baijal get busy settling a turf war on who, as the court says, is boss and superman, who will take ownership of the city which has been reduced to the comic book bleakness of Gotham? Remember this is not a coastal city like Mumbai or Chennai, which receive up to three times more the volume of rain that Delhi experiences. Yet a flooded Delhi looks no different in optics.

While crores are spent on desilting of sewers and water channels on paper, the reality is quite different. Only about half the city is connected to sewer lines, the other half is not though it surreptitiously channelises its waste flow to the same exit route. Infrastructure is multiplying overhead but not underground. The storm drain network is in a shambles, progressively constricted with increased garbage and refuse, which end up backflushing water than streaming it out. The dredging of the Yamuna is erratic and reckless sand-mining has already compromised the water flow. The less said about sanitary conditions and civic hygiene the better, the associated ills of vector-borne diseases having already made their annual appearance. Part of Delhi’s problem has to do with the fact that around 15 plus agencies are parcelling out the city’s expanse for maintenance with overlapping functionalities. By the time each agency decides who should take the initiative or which stretch falls under whose jurisdiction, the damage has been done. It is time for holistic unified action as ego battles have already pushed the city to the precipice.