Drenched in Excuses: How Mumbai’s Leaders Let the City Sink

Mumbai’s monsoon misery lays bare not just its drains, but the bankruptcy of its politics.

As the first monsoon showers lashed Mumbai, trains ground to a halt, roads vanished under swirling brown water, power flickered out and the political blame game began. Maharashtra’s ruling coalition, the Mahayuti (comprising of the BJP, the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar-led NCP) was quick to point fingers. Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde blamed the “unexpected” early arrival of the monsoon. It was a remark drenched in absurdity. The monsoon is not a rogue intruder. It arrives every year. What is truly unexpected, and unforgivable, is the government’s perennial unpreparedness.

Mumbai recorded its wettest May in over a century - 250mm in just 13 hours. But for a city that sits at the mercy of tropical cycles and rising sea levels, the failure to anticipate and mitigate such rainfall is no less than administrative dereliction. Local train services were paralysed; more than 50 services on Central and Harbour lines were cancelled. Water seeped into the newly built Worli Metro Station. The Acharya Atre Metro station had to be shut for three days. In South Mumbai, an internal municipal analysis identified 80 new flooding hotspots, adding to the 386 already on the BMC’s monsoon watchlist.

Despite the installation of 417 dewatering pumps, many failed during peak rainfall, crippling traffic and public transit. Even mini-pumping station operators were fined for negligence—too little, too late. The basic infrastructure of Mumbai, a city of 20 million and the nation’s financial capital, remains brittle and colonial in origin. That is not the fault of the clouds.

The opposition, particularly Aaditya Thackeray of the Shiv Sena (UBT), son of former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, has seized on the Mahayuti government’s failures. He has accused the state administration and the BMC of corruption, incompetence, and a lack of political will to protect the public. “Mumbai has collapsed in the rains, and it’s only May,” he scoffed. Thackeray has also charged the BJP with delaying local BMC elections to run the municipal body via proxy from the Chief Minister’s office. His barbs - “Why this hatred for Mumbai?” - landed hard. Shinde’s only retort was to gesture at the skies.

The BJP, in turn, has tried to blame the previous Sena-led BMC administration for systemic rot. Ashish Shelar, a BJP minister, suggested that the city’s current woes were rooted in years of (undivided) Shiv Sena misrule - an accusation that sparked angry poster campaigns from the UBT camp. The result was the over-familiar spectacle of mutual recrimination with parties (both ruling and opposition) offering few concrete solutions for why it continues to do so.

The romanticism of the rains, immortalized in Bollywood melodies like ‘Rimjhim Ghire Sawan,’ stands in stark contrast to the current political climate, where leaders seem more engrossed in mudslinging than in addressing the genuine concerns of the city’s residents.

This political trench warfare serves a larger purpose. For the BJP, attacking the UBT-led Sena helps justify its partnership with Shinde’s rebel faction. For Shinde, it diverts attention from his lacklustre performance in the Urban Development and Public Works departments over the past two and a half years. But all this noise comes at the expense of real governance. While leaders posture and pander to their base, ordinary Mumbaikars slosh through fetid streets, endure hours-long commutes, and fret about disease outbreaks.

The BMC’s response to the flooding has been more bureaucratic than bold. Fines and reports are trotted out after the fact, but the core of the problem remains unaddressed. Mumbai’s outdated stormwater drainage system, parts of which date back to the British era, cannot handle the volume and velocity of modern monsoon rains. The long-delayed Brimstowad project, a proposal to overhaul the city’s drainage, remains incomplete. Piecemeal interventions like pumping stations and temporary barricades may offer momentary relief, but they are not a substitute for a structural solution.

What Mumbai needs is not more spectacle, but stewardship. It needs serious investment in climate-resilient infrastructure: revamped drainage, flood-resilient construction norms, emergency response systems, and an empowered civic administration. It also needs accountable governance through local elections, not remote control. The absence of an elected BMC, long overdue, is itself an indictment of the ruling alliance’s priorities.

There is something uniquely tragic about the contrast between the poetic nostalgia Mumbai’s monsoons evoke and the bureaucratic chaos they now reliably unleash. The city of cinema and finance, of dabbawalas and Dalal Street, of sea spray and spirit, deserves better than to be reduced to a backdrop for seasonal blame games.

The Shiv Sena (UBT) has a point when it questions the Mahayuti’s handling of the crisis. But it is not blameless either. After decades of controlling the BMC, its own legacy is part of the mess. What Mumbai needs is not political scorekeeping but a new consensus: that monsoon resilience is a civic, not partisan, priority. Otherwise, it will remain locked in this yearly theatre of failure, drowning in both water and excuses.

Ultimately, when Mumbai’s streets flood, trains stall and power snaps, it is not the monsoon that has failed. It is the men in charge.