How can a city face floods and water scarcity at the same time?

A city can suffer severe flooding during the monsoon and still face water shortages months later. In today's 'YOUR INDIA' column, Santosh Nair looks at drainage, wetlands, lake loss and groundwater recharge to explain why both crises can emerge from the same broken urban water system.

A shopkeeper in Bengaluru spent part of last summer negotiating with a water tanker driver over the price of a single load. A few months later, monsoon water rose past his shop’s threshold in under an hour, ruining stock he had just restocked. Same shop. Same year. Two opposite disasters, both about water.

This is not a contradiction, even though it sounds like one. It is, in fact, close to the same problem wearing two different faces.

Mumbai’s drainage system was largely designed during the British colonial period to handle about 25 millimetres of rainfall an hour. Today, the city regularly receives rainfall exceeding 100 millimetres an hour during intense monsoon spells, four times what the underground pipes beneath its streets were ever built to carry. Delhi recorded 228.1 millimetres of rain within a single 24-hour period in 2024, more than the city’s entire average rainfall for the whole month of June. Across urban India, more than 70 per cent of cities still lack any scientifically designed stormwater drainage system at all.

Read more: How much water does your city actually have left?

How can the same city have too much water........

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