November is the cruellest month in A.P.

From the 9th of this month to the 19th, Nellore district received 740.4 mm of rain. 12 cyclones have devastated the coast this time of the year since the 1977 calamity.

November is the month of storms in Andhra Pradesh. It’s the month cyclones brew in the Bay of Bengal, bringing rains and wreaking havoc in the coastal districts. No fewer than 12 destructive cyclones have hit the coast in November since the awesome calamity of 1977, a storm still remembered with dread. That one triggered a storm surge that killed 15,000 people. It resides in the Telugu psyche as a metaphor for nature’s fury.

This November 19, even as people recalled the horrors and bravery of 1977, south coastal Andhra was living through a quick sequence of three low-octane depressions, not quite cyclones in the lexicon of the weather man, but the ones that devastated crop and property with sharp bursts of rain in three southern districts. It is because of November’s notoriety that farmers in the coastal districts hurry their sowing in July-August so as to reap the harvest before the whirlwinds blow in November.

Nellore was one of the three districts battered this November. The others were Chittoor and Kadapa. Nellore conventionally bears the brunt of the cyclones, and has withstood 25 calamitous impacts out of a total of 77 since 1891. Thanks to this November’s depressions, Nellore has been left bedraggled as never before. From the 9th of this month to the 19th, the district received 740.4 mm of rain, the most in 50 years, against the whole season average of 500 mm.

Topsy-turvy monsoon

It has been a topsy-turvy monsoon this year in Andhra Pradesh. Conventionally, the northeast monsoon is the lesser sibling of the southwest monsoon, wetting the southern districts of Nellore and Chittoor. But in recent years, the southwest monsoon has been setting in late. This year, it did not show up until late August and left the southern districts in deficit by the time it spent itself at the end of September. In contrast, the northeast monsoon has been aggressive, especially during November 9-19 and in Nellore.

The normally dry Rayalaseema districts received good rains during the same period (Anantapur with 31 per cent excess, Chittoor 131 per cent and Kadapa 99 per cent).

Meteorologists say they see a significant shift in the rainfall from the southwest monsoon to the northeast monsoon. “The Indian subcontinent is reeling under climate change. While the influence of the northeast monsoon is increasing, the influence of the southwest monsoon is decreasing. Ocean warming is also contributing significantly to weather change patterns,” says S.S.V.S. Ramakrishna, chairman of the Board of Studies of Andhra University’s Department of Meteorology and Oceanography.

Flash floods

The other noticeable thing about the wet spell since November 9 has been the cloudburst-like rainfall localised in some pockets, leading to flash floods in long-dry rivers. In Chittoor, the Swarnamukhi River, which had gone dry for a decade, sprang to life after one night of furious rains. The Kapila Theertham reservoir in Tirupati filled up after rains on the Tirumala hills.

The battering Nellore took during the last 11 days was due to unusually concentrated heavy rains in a limited area, causing flash floods in rivulets and streams in Gudur, Nayudupeta and Venkatagiri. “The rains came as if they were dumped in a particular area. Otherwise, the heavy flooding would not have taken place,” says B.V. Subba Rao, superintending engineer of the Somasila project in Nellore.

The cloudbursts forced Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu and his Ministers to take time off from their pet project, the new capital Amaravati, to visit the towns and villages that went under water. But what followed were something familiar: aerial surveys, commiserations with farmers who had lost their harvest and promises of relief. What was not given attention was urban flooding.

Flooding of cities in the peak rainy season is now a global phenomenon and has assumed epic proportions in cities like Mumbai. But to see that happen in smaller towns like Nellore and Tirupati must give pause to a great votary of urbanisation like Mr. Naidu, who declared at the World Economic Forum in New Delhi recently that “urbanisation is a reality, and it is unstoppable. Close to 80 per cent of the GDP is expected to come from urban areas in the near future.”

If indeed cities are the growth engines of the States, urban planning has to be of the highest priority in all cities of Andhra Pradesh and not just in the dream capital Amaravati.

It is clear from the Nellore deluge that extreme floods are no longer freak occurrences. As the environment group Sustainable Development Unit says, “Major floods that used to happen, say, every 100 years on an average may now start to happen every 10 or 20 years. The flood season may become longer and there will be flooding in places where there has never been any before.” In fact, as Andhra Pradesh’s cities grow, floods are not likely to happen once every 10 years; they are likely to happen annually as they do in almost all cities of India.

As Mr. Naidu’s vision for urbanising Andhra Pradesh takes shape, the challenges such as those faced in Nellore and Tirupati are surely likely to arise more frequently. In fact, it is an express concern in the city he plans to build, Amaravati. Inundation is likely to be a problem in the new capital city if the government does not address the issue of floods in the Kondaveeti Vagu.

The Kondaveeti Vagu, originating in the hill ranges of the capital territory, is one stream that can pose a challenge to the planners of the capital city — if proper plans are not in place. For years, the stream has been wreaking havoc on the local area disgorging 4,000-5,000 cusecs of floodwaters.

The capital project planners are eager to say everything has been considered. That must have been the very thing said when all city streets were built on low-level land. To say that it is only the poor who squat on such land is to be specious. In Hyderabad, for instance, the streets outside public buildings like the Raj Bhavan and the Chief Minister’s office, and some high-profile corporate institutions are prone to flooding after small rains, and this leads you to the notion that there must have been a lake here somewhere.