The advantage with hindsight is that even the proverbial fool, after the event, gets the chance of a lifetime to become wise. No, the event one is alluding to here is not the Chennai cataclysm, but the one that had ravaged Mumbai ten monsoons back. There had been a lesson in urban planning for all and sundry there; for coastal city Chennai, especially so. The Mumbai floods had been as much about unbridled concretisation and unabated corruption, as it had been about frenetic altering of land usage patterns and mindless disintegration of wetlands and rivers. Volumes were written, and innumerable studies done. The causes were underlined, and the solutions outlined.
Yet, the Mumbai floods obviously left no one much the wiser if the scale and devastation of recent natural disasters elsewhere in the country are any yardsticks to go by. Certainly not policymakers and their loyal enforcers. After all, knowledge, when not put to good use, is no wisdom at all. And those who cannot even use hindsight are probably not even worthy of being called fools.
Let's stay away from resting the blame on the usual and invariable suspects—politicians and bureaucrats, and do a quick recap of the wisdom that the Mumbai floods of 2005 had offered. The very many causes and their overlaps and cascading effects have been well-documented and relatively well-known too. What, however, is worth remembering is that Mumbai's Disaster Management Plan had been the country's first, and was said to have been in place for more than a decade when the city went under water. It was not a question of planning, if plans are about pompous words penned on a sheet of paper—it was one of implementation. If 2005 sounds too far behind in the past, one could as well look at the Uttarakhand and Srinagar floods.
It is important to talk about urban planning; it is equally important to understand why urban planning has been a disaster across the length and breadth of the country. It is not about laws being in place—we have quite a few good ones, though just a few more would be welcome. It is a question of laws being not adhered to. It is also not about adequate safeguards not being around; we have too many of them—albeit on paper. It is a question of safeguards being thrown to the winds.
An obsessive psyche that dictates policies when it comes to urban planning is at the root of urban disasters. One cannot have a 20th century mindset in formulating 21st century policies. It is imperative that policies reflect the signs of the times. Urban planning cannot be deemed planning at all unless it is sustainable. Today, the very concept of urban planning is being held hostage—by unscrupulous politicians, medieval bureaucrats, insatiable industry, and elitist lobby groups.
Agreed, it is easy, and perhaps a tad convenient too on one's part, to continually rest the blame on the politician-bureaucrat-corporate nexus for all things gone environmentally wrong. But in the case of all the disasters mentioned here, the pointers are damning, and they are more than just circumstantial. It would make no sense to paraphrase all that has been reported about the death of wetlands and choking of stormwater drains in the media. It would be more prudent to understand what the flouting of existing laws would mean in common parlance: corruption.
The Chennai disaster needs to be understood as a fallout of environmental corruption, for corruption is not just about the archetypal paying of a bribe under the table. It is crony capitalism, widespread fraudulent practices, rampant flouting of environmental laws and norms, the dismal enforcement of laws, among others. All those can be simply summed up as corruption. Of course, there have been loopholes in the planning system itself; but, as has been argued earlier, planning in itself means zilch unless not implemented in letter and spirit.
What's the use of generating so much information and translating that into knowledge, if it doesn't get transformed into wisdom that gets reflected on the ground. Environmentalists had warned in 2005 that what happened in Mumbai, could be repeated in other cities too. And what happened in Srinagar, Uttarakhand and Chennai can befall other cities and towns too. But such warnings are regrettably dismissed by policymakers as alarmist doomsday predictions. Every single time.
This is bound to happen in a milieu where hate-driven hysteria is assiduously built up against all those who prefer to understand politics and see development from an environmental perspective. A subversive establishment, aided and abetted by a by-and-large pliant media, has gone way beyond labelling the debate as a development versus environment battle; they have overtly and covertly, shamelessly and callously at that, in the last decade or so been branding environmentalists as anti-development spoilsports and anti-national degenerates. Environmentalists, both for the current regime in Delhi as well as the earlier dispensation, have become the enemies of the State.
But, considering that the heaviest price for the Chennai floods has been paid by its hapless and devastated citizens, we surely know who the real enemies of the people are.
True, that the Mumbai'05-to-Chennai'15 disasters offer little hope or succour; and there's no reason to feel despondent. There's, in fact, a classic case study that offers hope—that of Surat. The Gujarat town was one of the filthiest in the country when in 1994 it fell to a virulent plague. Twenty years later, it is one of the relatively-clean cities in the country. Surat could do a turn-around because it chose to, instead of wallowing in its sob story. The resurgence, in fact, was let by two bureaucrats (commissioners of the city), and the community was involved.
Mumbai and Chennai tell us what's wrong with urban planning, Surat tells us how to go about turning the problem on its head. The bottomline is what environmentalists always insist upon—community participation. For the people of Surat, wisdom did not drop from the skies. They themselves realised what a hell-hole their city had become, and resolved not to let history repeat itself. Citizens of other cities and towns too might want to take matters into their own hands.
