Every monsoon, Mumbai wages war against the rain. Too often, however, it is the city’s own administration that proves deadlier than the weather. The death of a 60-year-old man, swallowed by an uncovered manhole during civic maintenance work, was not an accident but the predictable consequence of administrative negligence so gross that it deserves to be treated as culpable homicide. A man walking on a public road vanished into a civic death trap created by the very agency en

As wetlands disappear beneath concrete, Mumbai’s resilience to floods and climate shocks is being severely undermined. Every monsoon season, Mumbai falls into a similar pattern. The rain comes down hard, flooding streets, stopping trains, leaving neighbourhoods wet for days and officials playing catch-up. Heavy rains and climate change are often blamed for these disruptions, but an equally important, but far less talked about, factor is the decline of the city’s wetlands. T