My father’s car is a 2001 Maruti model, so the other day when it broke down on a waterlogged road, and the water was threatening to seep into the car through the corners of the doors, I knew exactly what I had to do: pray.
And so I did — praying that the rain gods stop to rest, and the water level subsides, but to my disappointment, my prayer went unanswered. I even sang to myself the nursery rhyme ‘Rain rain go away, come again another day!’ while I sat in the driver’s seat in awe of the unprecedented showers, but it didn’t work either.
Eventually I realised that I was on the verge of being trapped there forever, and that I’d but one option left, and that was to escape; to abandon my father’s prized possession, and walk — no, swim — to safety.
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After a nearly two-hour ordeal, until the mechanic arrived and had the car towed to his garage, I took a bus and returned back home, but I couldn’t get over the scenes of waterlogging and flooded roads that I witnessed in different parts of the city.
The following day ushered in another day of reflection. The newspapers were full of pictures of inundated roads and residential areas, which made me reminisce my memories of monsoon from my school days, and how at the time, the post-rain scenes were so drastically different from what we experience nowadays.
I’m talking about the late-1980s, when one was able to ride through the roads even in the heaviest of downpours. Back then, the cities were not concrete jungles and one could smell the scent of moist earth after the rain had fallen. In those days, it was common to see young children running around the pavements on rainy days, where they would sail their tiny paper boats in the fast-flowing rainwater.
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Sadly, today, toss paper boats have become a metonym of a past that the new generation of children cannot access; the pavements, that once gave great joy, have become unusable (thanks to rampant encroachments), and the roads — meant to provide safety — have become virtual death traps.
You may blame it on poor engineering technique or climate change, but the reality is that today, the transition of waterlogging/flooding scenario in cities from bad to worse has become a pan-India phenomenon.
Of course, efforts, such as the Smart City initiative, are being made to improve the present state of affairs, but whether it will be enough is not clear.
One thing that is clear is that in the future the battle to tackle waterlogging and flooding of the cities will involve more than convincing people to build grassy front lawns, or dig underground tanks to capture rainwater from rooftops.
Municipal and State governments across the country will need to make concerted efforts and take a variety of initiatives: building soak away systems, upgrading the existing drainage structures, proactive scheduling to clean the drains early on, and forming rapid-response teams to provide timely relief to those affected — to name but a few of them, so that things become better in the future, so that our cities remain in order even during heavy downpours, so that people do not get stuck in traffic snarls for hours, so that pavements remain accessible and easy to navigate, and the paper boats be able to sail along smoothly — just the way they used to.
rajeshkrishan77@gmail.com