Why is flooding a norm in Indian cities?

Indian cities swing between two water crises. Rain floods them, and summer drains them dry. The root cause behind both is simple: Indian cities have built almost no functioning underground infrastructure.

Three systems together regulate how water moves through a city: sewerage, piped water connections, and stormwater pipelines. This infrastructure remains largely out of sight, and across most of urban India, city governments either leave it under-maintained or never build it at all.

Ancient cities rose on exactly this kind of infrastructure. Aqueducts carried water in, and sewerage systems carried waste out; together, those networks made city life possible in the first place. India’s cities have failed on both counts.

Sewerage systems separate waste water from clean water and ensure that waste discharge harms no one downstream. Researchers have long identified the development and maintenance of sewerage systems as key drivers of human health and progress. Yet huge, densely populated areas of Indian cities have no sewerage system beneath them at all. Waste water soaks into the ground or runs off untreated into rivers.

Clean water supply fares little better. The infrastructure that delivers drinkable water reaches only a fragment of most cities, and households across huge areas go without it. Families pump groundwater instead and run it through private filters to get water they can drink, and for some of the world’s most populous cities, that arrangement wastes money and effort on a massive scale.

Stormwater canals form the third missing piece. These canals direct rainwater away and prevent it from pooling in the streets. Where such a network exists at all, encroachment or fragmentation has usually broken it apart, and preventing floods requires a network planned as a whole and maintained around the clock, not scattered fragments patched up after each monsoon.

City governments currently treat this infrastructure the way someone might treat a pipe with many leaks: they patch it, rather than replace it, and that patching carries consequences nobody sees until the next crisis.

Human health absorbs the largest of those consequences. Every time it rains, the three separate channels- sewers, drinking water pipelines, and stormwater drains- collapse into each other, and the resulting mix spreads waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. These diseases now survive mainly in poor cities. Wealthier cities eliminated them once they built proper underground infrastructure.

Public health institutions compound the problem. Rather than fix the infrastructure that spreads disease at its source, they treat outbreaks with antibiotics, which reach Indian populations cheaply and in huge volume. Pathogens exposed to that volume of medication have grown resistant over time, and the medication’s power to cure has begun to fade.

The neglect shows up even in India’s wealthiest settlements. Gurugram, for instance, still lacks a functional sewerage system, piped drinking water, and stormwater tunnels. Missing infrastructure of this kind now ranks among the largest threats to human safety in urban India.