Underpass & Flyovers: Blueprint for Delhi’s Destruction?
A shaken Delhi
For a city where 98% of the total annual rainfall pours down in less than a month, planning can never be easy. When the latter is carried out hurriedly as if to meet a certain 2010 target, what can happen is what Delhi is witnessing today. A delayed monsoon that gave up to the changing climate met an infrastructure in the making of a ‘world class city’. Roads were flooded with water (and cars), parts of it went down, trees uprooted themselves, the Metro Rail stopped and the traffic came to a standstill. Urban mobility was yet again held ransom. Any by none other than the very forces of Mother Nature which only ask for a sustainable development in exchange.
The first of such downpours in this season, which took place during the evening hours of 27th of July, not just clogged the traffic, it also flooded Delhi and put the spaciously built Lodhi Colony under five feet of sewer water. The stretch from India Habitat Center to Kotla experienced a Mumbai that night and residents (some of whom were living here for the past 18 years) were shocked at something that had never before happened to their part of the city. The water entered the parked cars and stranded several including me in the flood. The rains stopped and so did the rising water level but most ground floor residents did not sleep that night.
Apparently, the nullah adjacent to Lodhi Colony (that separates it from Kotla) is being closed and concertized to make parking space for the nearby Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium (for CWG 2010). The temporary stoppage of sewer water for the construction work could not hold the rains and stormed into Lodhi Colony. With the nullah gone and the sewer outfall into it closed, flood water had no place to go. A clear case of interfering with the natural drainage of the city, leading to a perfectly understood “man-made” disaster.




The Centre for Science and Environment
All are invited for a cultural evening “Woh Din Ki Jiska Wada Tha” on the occasion of the concluding ceremony of Sadhbhawna Diwas at the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House.
