Monsoon Meltdown

For Mumbai, the monsoon is less a season than a recurring humiliation. Each year, torrents of rain descend on India’s financial capital. And each year, the same grim rituals unfold: flights circling helplessly above the city, trains creeping along tracks like rusting toys, highways turned into fetid canals, and schoolchildren stranded in flooded buses. The downpour that pummelled the city on Monday (177mm rain in just a few hours) brought with it a script as predictable as the tides. Water submerged low-lying roads, nallahs overflowed into arterial highways and weary citizens wading through waist-deep muck. The police put up a brave show of rescues, while the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) declared a token half-day holiday for schools.

But the truth is starker: the flooding of Mumbai is not an act of God. It is an act of governance or the lack of it. Despite decades of warnings, expert reports and tragedies, the city remains incapable of handling a seasonal deluge. The monsoon has become an annual stress test that the state consistently fails. Each deluge exposes the rot in the civic machinery: silted drains left uncleared, encroachments tolerated for profit and an infrastructure built for ribbon-cutting ceremonies rather than resilience.

The BMC, India’s richest municipal corporation, commands a budget larger than several Indian states. Yet when the rains arrive, the world’s sixth-most populous metropolis resembles a medieval village. Transport and commerce get instantly derailed, forcing airlines to plead with passengers to arrive early while office workers trudge through filthy water to reach home. The Bandra-Kurla Complex, Mumbai’s much-touted business hub, clocked over 100mm of rain only to see its swanky boulevards morph into swamps.

Officials will protest that extraordinary rain is to blame. While the city did record upwards of 100mm in just twelve hours, Mumbai’s vulnerabilities are not new. As far back as 2005, when nearly a thousand people died in catastrophic flooding, reports urged the city to expand stormwater drains, protect its mangroves and invest in sustainable urban planning. Successive governments promised action. However, two decades later, the same warnings echo unheard. Politicians promise ‘long-term solutions.’ Each red alert from the meteorological office is treated as though it were an unforeseen calamity rather than a predictable weather event.

Cities from Jakarta to New Orleans grapple with the collision between urbanisation and climate. But what sets Mumbai apart is the mismatch between its wealth and its decrepitude. Here is a metropolis that fancies itself India’s gateway to the world, home to billionaires and Bollywood, yet it cannot guarantee that a child will return home dry during a monsoon downpour.

Ultimately, the tragedy of Mumbai’s rains lies in the normalisation of collapse. Citizens expect nothing better, having grown inured to the annual choreography of chaos. A truly global city would have treated the 2005 deluge as its final warning. Instead, Mumbai has made its peace with the deluge. Unless accountability replaces complacency, the monsoon will continue to remain a civic indictment.