Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Support our Journalism

9th Anniversary: Free Tote & Mug

Gurugram is a city of private enclaves connected by public failure

Gurugram’s residents no longer register the city’s monsoon as a surprise. They experience it as paranoia, anticipating the rains with dread.

If Gurugram could manifest as an emotion over the last week, it would probably choose rage and helplessness. In the city that houses the offices of more than half the world’s Fortune 500 companies, an exhausted little schoolgirl sat on the highest bench of a daily needs shop, surrounded by a pool of murky water, and wailed into the open. 

Adults stuck at the shop tried to console her, but the child—holding on to her pink plastic water bottle with all her might—would not stop crying for her parents. Two other equally morose children sat in front of her, stranded after their school bus gave way after the city experienced 75 mm rainfall in the span of a workday. These kids weren’t the only ones stuck in the deluge. About a dozen private-school buses carrying kids from nursery upward were mired nose to tail in the filthy pond that sprang up between Subhash Chowk and Rail Vihar.

One hopes that the children reached home safely, though the trauma they endured will likely linger. Their parents suffer with them. Siddharth Kasid, 39, all but gave up on Gurugram that day, after witnessing firsthand the danger that his child was in. The employee of a multinational investment bank spent the afternoon looking at his five-year-old daughter’s location on an app, tracking the school bus’s movement. When Kasid realised that the flooded stretch outside his home meant that the bus wouldn’t be able to reach it, he started walking toward it through waist-deep water, dodging open manholes and rubble from the metro construction—a walk he later described as “more intense and gruelling than the trek to Vaishno Devi”.

On reaching the spot, Kasid found 10 stalled buses with very young children inside. Along with his daughter—who asked if it was Holi—he was able to bring back a few other students with him, walking them single-file. Kasid then echoed the question several of Gurugram’s residents, rich and poor, have been asking for years. “We pay hefty taxes and exorbitant school fees, and this is how the city is maintained? I hate it now,” he said. “Gurugram is simply not worth living in anymore.”

By next afternoon, a portal opened up on a stretch of the service lane at IFFCO Chowk and swallowed Gurugram’s pretensions about itself. Underneath the crucial junction, which connects the city with the international airport and........

© ThePrint