If Rains can halt Indian cities…
It is only rains for godssake! And it comes every year at this time, agreed that it is a bit too heavy this time, but still…
If just the annual rains can bring great Indian cities like Mumbai (in June), Chennai and Bangalore to a grinding halt, then what havoc will actual disasters wreak??
Transportation is virtually non-existent - everybody heard of the stories of Mumbaikars wading through waist-deep waters for hours to reach their homes. And now it is the turn of the cities that are making waves outside India - Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai.
Flights have been diverted to Thiruvananthapuram. Trains have been cancelled or delayed. Buses are not running. And all the IT and Corporate woes come welling up again, just like the floods.
Have not Indian municipalities heard of Drainage? Even with slight rains the streets of Chennai get flooded, not to mention this year’s extreme.
Another peculiar behaviour of Indian cities/states is that only when they come across a nasty situation do they learn. I mean, the June floods in Mumbai taught the BMC a lesson but not the other cities. It looks like each Indian city would have to be flooded for them to learn.
Well, let’s hope that next year there are better drains that do not get clogged with ‘plastic’, which is where the BMC put the blame.
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[...] I wrote yesterday only a few hours before this fateful event complaining about how rains can stop our cities from functioning. We all know that our infrastructure is not the best - if rains should not halt normal life, then improve the infrastructure before showing that rains are just vagaries of nature! Instead, we have continued to overlook the power of Nature, its fury, and went on trains speeding into flooded rivers. [...]