Mumbai's floods are, by scientific consensus, unavoidable. 

"If 90 mm of rain occurs in two hours, any city in the world will flood," says Dr Subimal Ghosh, Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Convener of the Interdisciplinary Program in Climate Studies at IIT Bombay, explaining that no city in the world, irrespective of the public infrastructure in place, can prevent flooding at that intensity of rainfall.

Mumbai now receives such extreme rainfall (300-500 mm) in just three to four days every monsoon. 

Ghosh believes the real question is no longer whether the city can stop flooding, but how quickly it can warn people before the water rises. And for that, he points to a model built 1,800 kilometres away, on India's eastern coast.

A cyclone that changed everything

On 29 October 1999, a super cyclone tore through Odisha with winds crossing 250 kmph, killing close to 10,000 people. It remains one of India's deadliest natural disasters. 

Two decades later, cyclones of comparable intensity strike the same coastline and claim a fraction of the lives once lost, largely because of a warning and evacuation system built brick by brick since that tragedy.

IAS officer Pradeep Kumar Jena, who has managed disaster response in Odisha for over 20 years, has spoken about the state's "zero-human-casualty" mission, a goal set after 1999 and pursued relentlessly since. 

When Cyclone Fani struck in 2019 with wind speeds........

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