When Nature Strikes—India's Burgeoning Population and Rampant Urbanisation Will Only Spell Doom!

It's about 5AM and as I write this down and I haven't been able to get any sleep. I felt it was best to jot some thoughts down. Earlier tonight, I was out at midnight, and saw the local Fire brigade pumping out water from basements of few flooded apartment complexes. Here's a link to the previous post in case you want to know more.

^{Cyclone Mekunu Source}

Heavy rains have subsided to a gentle drizzle, highways are no more clogged and there's hardly anyone on the streets. Mangalore feels like a ghost town, albeit soaking wet! However, the expectation is that we might see another bad day of rain before the cyclone passes way. We shall see!

Maintenance crews from the Electricity department were on full-swing in multiple areas of the city restoring power supply. I was on my way home when my mother informed me that the electricity was restored. We've had no power supply close to 14 hours!

Luckily electricity, and internet were both restored. I quickly booked my tickets for some upcoming travels, made a couple of calls, a few quick crypto trades and even caught an episode of The Flash. It really feels great to come back to a life of high-speed internet! But I couldn't asleep, my mind is rather busy!

^Source

In about 5 hours from now we'll have a scheduled mid-week power cut which will last for another 8-10 hours. But that's something we've gotten used to for many decades. This is the Modern India, and I live in one of the better cities. You'd rather be here and face these issues than in most other places-including metros, which in my opinion in some ways worse off in case of a disaster!

I'm also glad to be on the coast because the water drains out from the city into the sea rather quickly. In the past 3 decades here, we've never experienced flooding anywhere remotely close to yesterday. But we've experienced rains 2-3x in it's intensity almost every year throughout my childhood.

Admittedly, in those days a few farmlands would be briefly submerged. Few houses of the fishing community that resides on the coastline would be affected by erosion of the coastline. Those were mostly the bigger issues, along with a few uprooted trees crashing on houses and power lines. Lives if lost were mostly due to freak accidents. Every year, we'd hear the same news. But now there are many other issues.

Mangalore, is a popular hub and a great place for education. People come here from all over the country to study. Over time this has increased permanent immigration into the city. This is the case with most cities in India as rural population moved into urban areas in search of a better quality of life and employment opportunities.

Infact, all major metro and Tier 2 cities have witnessed this change and now we're bearing the consequences. We can't blame the immigration as much as the explosion in our population.

We're the second biggest population after all. This has led to rapid and rampant urbanisation. City corporations have given permits to anyone to construct buildings without preparing for any disasters. These issues are just man-made disasters waiting to happen.

Infact major cities already face massive water logging issues because of illogical or mostly nil-planning for these common eventualities. Let's face it, we're a tropical country and heavy rain and seasonal cyclones aren't new to us. But lack of public internet towards proper planning in construction of city and urban areas has led to a grave situation which if not tackled in time is going to lead to greater distress.

Most of my town is concretised, especially the heavily populated areas of the city. Roads, pavements, even the drains! There's hardly any scope for the water to get soaked up by the ground.

Soil in these parts have a decent ability to soak up the water and this also helped improve the ground water table-which infact has started depleting in the past decade. Somehow the administration felt, it's better to throw concrete everywhere and let the water drain into the sea. Well, this is how it worked out and it's too late to go back!

I can only hope that our local administration and general public take disaster management seriously after this experience. Infact, all invested parties and major stakeholders need to give this some serious thought and invest into tackling such scenarios in the future.

^Source

Mangalore, as a city holds tremendous potential for development in various areas but seeing as we crumbled to a stop today, albeit for a few hours, revealed the unfortunate truth that in the face of a larger adversity we're quite helpless. We managed to pull through this fairly quickly. But as far as disasters go we've only seen the tip of the iceberg.

I'd rather not see my city go through it as some others have in the recent past of my country. But looking at how good we are at avoiding matters of importance, I will try not to hold my breath. But only brace for the worst on my own.

The local administration has already washed off it's hands saying the flooding was no fault of it. Rain is common is common occurrence they said to a press publication today. But I hope in a decade from now I can revisit these words on my blog and say that there has been a positive change and we aren't facing these issues anymore.

My fingers are crossed and I'm really hoping for a change!

There are more pictures here!

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