In 2015, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) called the Chennai Floods a “man made disaster” and indeed it is true that the encroachment of lakes and river floodplains has driven the city of Chennai in this seemingly ineluctable situation once again in 2019. The Chennai floods are a symbol of consistent human failings and poor urban design which is the typical sorrow of the Indian urban centers and indeed, urban centers all around the world.

Unlike traffic jams, or crime, environmental degradation is not what most people can easily see or feel in their day to day lives and therefore when the consequences of such degradation wreak havoc, it becomes difficult to draw the correlation of nature’s vengeance with human failings. In Chennai, more than 30 water bodies have disappeared in the past century. The concretization has precluded much of the rainwater from percolating into the soil thereby depleting the rainwater levels to a point of no return.

Chennai, however, is not alone in suffering this human folly. Urbanization at the cost of reclaiming water bodies is a pan-India and in fact a worldwide phenomenon. One can look at cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad and even abroad, for example, Mexico City to find the same trend in action. In Bengaluru 15 lakes have lost their character only in the past 4.5 years as per a High Court notice to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). The encroached areas are now being used as bus stand, a stadium and quite ironically as the office of the Pollution Control Board. In Mexico City, what was once a network of lakes built by the Aztecs in the 11th and 12th centuries, is a downtown city center established by the conquering Spaniards who waged war against water by draining out the lakes. Now the Mexico city downtown sinks a few metres every year causing immense damage to the buildings in the economic hub of the nation and rendering the clay-like sediments of the old lakebeds more prone to being damaged by earthquake vibrational waves.

Quite similarly in Hyderabad, the byzantine network of tanks and lakes built by the Kakatiya dynasty in medieval centuries disappeared during the colonial rule and under the watch of subsequent governments. However, the question is not what follies were committed in the past, the question is what we can do in the present and more importantly what lies ahead in the future. Thankfully, there are a few lessons to be learnt. In Hyderabad, the Chief Minister of Telangana, launched a massive rejuvenation movement in form of Mission Kakatiya which involves the restoration of irrigation tanks and lakes built by the Kakatiya dynasty. From the perspective of intergenerational justice, this is a move towards giving the future generations of Telangana their rightful share of water and therefore a life of dignity. The city of Hyderabad is now moving towards a sustainable hydraulic model with some of the best minds in the country working on it. This model integrates six sources of water in a way that even the most underdeveloped areas of the city can have equitable access to water resources and the ground water levels get restored to avoid a calamity as has been witnessed in Chennai.

The larger question is, what stops us from learning from each other? When Mexico City can create a new executive position of a “Resilience Officer” to save its sinking urban sprawls, and when Bengaluru, to its credit can reclaim a lake like Kundalahalli through CSR funds in a Public Private Partnership model, and when Hyderabad and the larger state of Telangana can rebuild its resilience through a combination of political will and well-designed policies such as the Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Scheme and Mission Kakatiya, why should not other urban centres adopt, remodel, and implement some of the best practices to proactively avoid disaster? The answer perhaps lies in the tendency of policymakers to discount the future and their obsession of focusing on the here and now.

It is estimated that half of Indians will be dwelling in cities by the year 2050 – just about thirty years from now. If we truly see a great future for this country, can we possibly risk the lives of half of our people, our children and grandchildren – who will be living a life in cities parched in drought or stranded in floods, mortified by earthquakes or torn in wars over water? What has happened in Chennai or what happened in Kerala last year – these are not alarm bells that we can snooze, these are explosions. If we do not wake up to these now, then nature would wreak such havoc on humanity that we would not need nuclear bombs for our obliteration.