A cataclysmic natural event does not qualify as a disaster unless human lives and property are affected. The very framing of an event as a ‘natural’ disaster pre-concludes at least a partial culpability of nature’s actions over peoples. But living as we do in the Anthropocene – a period where human actions are the dominant influence on geology, climate and the environment – it is debatable whether at all there is anything left that is natural about nature.

Every flood, cyclone, heat wave, drought or earthquake brings in its wake boringly trite debates on whether nature’s fury or human folly was to blame for the disaster. Even before the dust settles on these conversations, an equally banal question, ‘So, what is the solution?’ is posed, sometimes as a query, but more often as a challenge. Not much time is devoted to exploring what it is that we are seeking an alternative to, whether or not the formulation of the problematique is robust, and if a solution can at all be given within the self-imposed restrictions of political and financial viability.

The December 2015 floods in Chennai resulted in the predictably ritualistic soul-searching that follows every natural disaster. A litany of usual suspects was invoked – unprecedented rainfall, inadequate drainage, poor urban planning, ill-maintained stormwater drains, encroachments in waterbodies, lack of infrastructure, corrupt politicians, unscrupulous builders – along with a not-so-usual suspect, namely, climate change.

The city and state administration blamed the flooding on unprecedented rains. A report in NDTV quotes Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, the late J. Jayalalithaa as saying, ‘Losses are unavoidable when there’s very heavy rain. Swift rescue and relief alone are indicators of a good government.’ Made in mid-November 2015, when the worst was still to come, the statement was intended to normalize a human-made disaster, and gloss over the pathology of urban development under successive administrations.

 

There is no basis to claim that the rains were unprecedented, considering that the city has unbroken rain records only from two monitoring stations and for only less than 250 years. That duration is a poor sample to predict the behaviour of nature that has evolved over four billion years. Also, in the climate uncertain times that we currently live in, the unprecedented may become an annual phenomenon.

Addressing Chennai’s flooding problem is fraught with dilemmas that arise from building a city on a flood plain. Chennai is not alone, though. Tokyo, Srinagar, Mexico City, Bangkok, Baghdad and Paris are just a few of the many cities that are at risk from flooding because of their location. Some cities are better prepared than others, but none is risk-free.

 

Consider the case of Tokyo. If engineering interventions were the answer, one would expect this technologically sophisticated Japanese city to be well equipped to deal with floods. The floods of September 2015, which struck the Kanto region, northeast of Tokyo, were triggered by torrential rains that swelled the Kinugawa river that flooded Kanto. An article in Japan Times warned that, ‘It’s just a matter of time before Tokyo is struck by the same magnitude of flooding... and should the capital remain unprepared it will most likely be ‘annihilated’.¹ The article quoted Noboyuki Tsuchiya, a civil engineer and author of Shuto Suibotsu (The Capital Submerged) who said that if similar rains fell over Tokyo and swelled the Arakawa or Tone rivers, ‘the flooding would lead to unprecedented fatalities and an economic catastrophe that would send shock waves around the world.’

A post-mortem of Chennai’s floods raises a number of difficult questions: Can Chennai continue to grow without eroding its resilience to natural shocks? Can flood mitigation measures be carried out without exposing Chennai to other natural extremes such as storms, heat waves and water scarcity? Can hard and potentially unpopular decisions, such as removal of encroachments from sensitive areas, be taken in a political system where the government changes every five years? Can the city go about business as usual and still hope to cope with extreme weather events that will increase in frequency and intensity in the years to come?

 

Chennai is naturally flood prone as it was built on the flood plains of three rivers – Adyar, Cooum and Kosasthalaiyar. But its location on the high energy Coromandel coast and its tropical hot climate make the city prone to a lot more than merely a flooding risk. May and June are the heat shock season. Cyclones and storm surges visit between October and December, bringing with them gale force winds, tidal surges and copious rainfall. Despite the substantial rainfall – which averages 140 cm annually – Chennai is perennially insecure about drinking water. In November 2015, before the spate of disastrous rains began, only 535 million litres of water was being supplied daily as against a requirement of more than 800 million litres a day.

The city is not without its defences, though. The city is bound on the south and north by the Kovalam and Ennore creeks, and to the east by the Bay of Bengal. Low-flung hills dot the western edges of the city. Along the city’s southern edges lie the Pallikaranai marshlands – once sprawling, but now reduced to less than a tenth of its original size as garbage dumps, glass and steel buildings housing IT companies, and infrastructure and housing to service these industries have sprouted within the wetland.

 

Sandy beaches and dunes carpeted with vegetation like screwpine and palmyra retard violent storms, soak up fresh water and keep the sea from intruding too far into the groundwater. Mangrove-studded estuaries and salt marshes are biological marvels that also serve as shock absorbers during the monsoon by buffering flood waters and regulating their exit to sea.

In the pre-industrial era, the areas that now make up Chennai were settled as temple towns and agricultural villages either around naturally occurring wetlands like the Pallikaranai or by carving out irrigation tanks (called eri in Tamil) in the gently undulating flood plain. Eris mitigate floods and improve water security by storing rainwater and recharging groundwater. A 2011 article in The Hindu cites a IIT Madras research project that found approximately 650 waterbodies existed in the Chennai region.²

The region’s humid tropical climate is conducive for vegetation which is characterized by scrub, grasslands and patches of tropical dry evergreen forests. Large trees were only found in pockets and usually where residents planted them to make the area more habitable. Tree cover is vital in regulating microclimate and temperatures.

If the wind, water, fire combination of factors is taken seriously, Chennai would find itself severely restricted in its mission to expand its urban footprint and grow by developing its manufacturing, commercial and service industries. The fact that modern Chennai is less prepared and more exposed than pre-modern Chennai to floods, cyclones and heat indicates that administrators and planners have gone about their jobs without regard to the region’s vulnerabilities.

 

From an unassimilated scattering of agrarian villages and seaside fishing hamlets, Chennai’s transformation as an urban cluster with thriving trade and industry began with the arrival of the British East India Company in 1639. The prevailing Tamil land use at the time focused on ordering life around the eris. Habitations were located up gradient of the eri’s waterspread, and farmlands and grazing areas (meikal) below. The meikal and farm plots were designed to be flooded as the water brought with it nourishing silt.

Dating back to the Chola times, land in Tamil villages were classified as warapet (taxable and assessed wet lands), tirwapet (assessed dry lands), tarisu (waste – recently uncultivated or historically uncultivated lands) and poromboke. Poromboke denoted unassessed lands reserved for communal and public use, including commons such as cremation or burial grounds, roads, lakes, tanks, rivers, forests, grasslands, grazing grounds and the margins of roads, waterbodies and the sea.

Barring the natham porombokes where dwelling units were permitted, the commons were left to remain open to the skies. No construction was permitted on it, and there were prohibitions and strict regulations discouraging the diversion of poromboke for any other land use. This categorization has survived with some modifications in the current revenue classification as handed down by the British with the Ryotwari system.

Keeping wetlands and other communal use porombokes off limits for construction was sensible from a hydrological perspective. Rainwater run-off is greater in built up areas than in open spaces with or without vegetation. For the same quantum of rainfall then, watercourses and waterbodies downgradient of built up areas will reach their carrying capacities far quicker than they would if the catchment were left open. It is a fact that the poromboke is the backbone of our economy.

Over the years, in colloquial Tamil and common usage, the word poromboke has come to be used as a pejorative to refer to people or places that are worthless. Not surprisingly, the etymological corruption of the word has closely mirrored the physical degradation of the commons. A large share of the blame for the 2015 floods can be laid squarely on the wanton desecration of the poromboke. In its bid to become a world-class investment destination, Chennai – like many other cities – has foolishly opted to replace the natural infrastructure of survival that the poromboke provides with the infrastructure for international commerce.

 

Since the 1940s, successive committees set up to look into the causes of floods have pointed to the encroachment of watercourses and waterbodies as a key contributor to urban flooding. Concerned citizens and NGOs have filed several Public Interest Litigations (PILs) seeking to remedy the situation. But the PIL is not a magic bullet. Courts of law are not equipped to undo the damage caused by encroachments into waterbodies. Only unlicensed structures are encroachments as defined by law. Under law, a license is all important; the location of the structure does not matter.

The 35 km Mumbai Coastal Freeway is proposed to run through the sea, requiring the conversion of sea space into land. From the perspective of the sea and nature, the road is an encroachment. Mumbai’s fisherfolk too may see that as an encroachment. The Coastal Regulation Zone Notification, 2011, too prohibited such reclamation. But that changed last December when the then Environment Minister Javadekar amended the CRZ Notification legalizing the proposed reclamation for Mumbai’s sealink road.³ Human law can be amended to make exceptions. Nature’s law grants no exemptions and cannot be changed by the offer of a bribe or compelling arguments. As far as nature is concerned, the license, even one endorsed by the highest court of law, does not matter if the location is wrong.

 

In Chennai, government is one of the biggest wetland encroachers. They and many elite institutions and buildings have licenses to encroach. The poor, on the other hand, are pushed by an unequal and unwelcoming society to build their huts on the margins of the sea, roads, rivers and lakes. The dwellings of the marginalized are mostly unlicensed – insecure of tenure and vulnerable to the vagaries of nature.

The survival encroachments of Chennai’s poor are a threat to themselves more than they are a threat to flooding the rest of the city. Unless they occupy entire waterscapes, the thatch and ramshackle constructions built on the margins of seas, watercourses and waterbodies lack the structural tenacity to block or divert waterflow. Elite encroachments, on the other hand, are more robust – Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA)-approved layouts, National and State Highways, IT Special Economic Zones, and state of the art transport corridors may have legal sanction but come rainy season, they endanger themselves and others by blocking and diverting floodwaters.

 

The issue of ‘illegal’ encroachments and its removal is imbued with a class bias against the poor. After every flood, cyclone or tsunami, the judiciary and the government renew their resolve to rid the city’s waterbodies or the coast of encroachments by making lofty declarations to that effect. The actual action on the ground is restricted to police assisted evictions of the poor from their dwellings on the banks of the Adyar or the Cooum or another waterbody. In December 2015, the city government announced that it would remove hutments from river and canal banks and relocate oustees in Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board tenements in Perumbakkam and Ezhil Nagar. Both sites are located in low-lying flood prone areas. Cyclone Vardah, which visited Chennai in December 2016, left a trail of destruction in its wake, caused mostly by high-velocity winds. At 203 mm over a 24 hour period, the rains were heavy but nowhere near the downpour of December 2015; Chennai for most part escaped flooding. Perumbakkam, however, was instantly flooded and remained underwater for four days.

Flood mitigation is merely one of the pretexts to clear hutments from waterways. At various times, and sometimes simultaneously, the state and city governments have justified slum clearance citing a need for infrastructure development, eco-restoration or city beautification. Sifting through the maze of factors that contribute to flooding or the degraded state of the city’s waterbodies, successive governments unerringly hone on ‘slum eviction as an achievable first step.’⁴

In 2009, the DMK government announced a Rs 1200 crore plan to restore Chennai’s rivers, particularly the Cooum, by focusing on one aspect – ‘removing encroachments in the city limits and developing the areas retrieved into parks.’ Though touted as a ‘river restoration’ project, this effort was merely a questionable exercise in beautification. The insincerity of the government’s claims to care for the river were exposed when the same government simultaneously announced the 19 km Elevated Expressway project between Chennai port and National Highway 45. Rejecting a shorter, straighter connection, the alignment of the proposed expressway followed the curving path of the Cooum.

 

As justification, the project document claimed that, ‘Construction of such project road will result in the evacuation of slum areas present along the riverbank.’⁵ In the government’s scheme of things, the obvious hydrological impact of running a road on the Cooum riverbed was a justified risk when weighed against the twin benefits of freight transport and slum eviction.

The last two decades have witnessed a rash of projects that pursued this calculus of prioritizing short-term commercial considerations over the ecological services offered by wetlands. Politically and financially, building on wetlands is an attractive proposition: land acquisition costs are reduced as the poromboke lands are vested with the government; and politically fraught negotiations with private land owners can be averted. That is why most of the state assisted projects like roads, rail corridors, SEZs and industrial estates have come up wherever poromboke lands, usually waterbodies, were available.

The 337 acre ELCOT IT SEZ in Sholinganallur housing Wipro, Tech Mahindra, Satyam and Cognizant was carved out of the Pallikaranai marsh and sits at the point where waters from the north, west and south of the marsh exits into the Okkiyam Maduvu canal. The Siruseri IT SEZ set up by state owned SIPCOT is likewise located at a point where waters from three directions converge to exit to the Buckingham canal and Kovalam creek. The Mass Rapid Transit System’s elevated rail corridor extended to serve the newly developed IT corridor runs along the Buckingham canal before veering west through the Pallikaranai marshland. An extension to the second runway at the Chennai International Airport was built almost entirely over the riverbed of the Adyar – exposing both the airport and the surrounding areas to flood risk.

High-speed, multi-lane roads, including the East Coast Road and the Old Mahabalipuram Road (IT Corridor), have been laid with no regard to water flow. Raised several feet above the level of surrounding areas, these roads are veritable dams that block east-flowing waters.

 

To accommodate the population boom that followed the IT explosion, the government reclassified lakes, grazing and marshland porombokes in the city’s south as sites for residential layouts and gated communities. The case of Velachery (see maps) is telling. Located at the southern edge of the Chennai Metropolitan Area (CMA), Velachery is bound on the northern side by the Velachery eri (tank) and on the west by the Adambakkam eris. A 1970 Survey of India topographical map identifies the areas to the northwest and west of Velachery and Adambakkam lakes respectively as settled habitations (natham), and the areas to the east and south of the two lakes as a grazing or meikal poromboke.

In a matter of decades, the Velachery lake has shrunk to a quarter of its original water spread of 108 hectares. The Adambakkam eris and the vast low-lying meikal plains below the Velachery tank are now buried under a maze of buildings.

 

The demand for land hungry infrastructure did not just happen. It was intentionally designed. Between 1991 and 2001, CMA’s population increased from 5.8 million to 7.04 million.⁶ Rather than check the growing urban population, the central and state governments worked out schemes to increase it even further. In 2005, the UPA government announced the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, which noted almost ruefully that only 28 per cent of the India’s 1027 million population (2001 census) lived in urban areas.

 

According to a Mission Overview document published by the Government of India, ‘…the liberalization policies adopted by the Government of India is expected to increase the share of the urban population… to about 40 per cent of total population by the year 2021. It is estimated that by the year 2011, urban areas would contribute about 65 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). However, this higher productivity is contingent upon the availability and quality of infrastructure services.’⁷

Prepared in 2007, Chennai’s Second Master Plan 2026 projected the population in CMA to increase to 8.9 million by 2011 and 12.5 million by 2026. Much of this growth is designed to happen through horizontal expansion in new areas, and not through vertical densification.

Master plans are meant to be about wise land use planning that facilitates the city’s growth without compromising its environmental resilience. Land use conversions, particularly of farmlands, forests and wetlands to built forms would therefore require to be disclosed, discussed and justified in the plan document. But the Chennai master plan’s chapter on ‘Land Use Planning and Strategy’ makes no mention of the intent to convert land use. The devil, in this case, is not in the detail. Rather, tucked away in two tables listing existing land use in 2006 and proposed land use in 2026, are entries that hint at the impending flooding woes of North Chennai.

From 6563 hectares in 2006, industrial area in the CMA is set to increase to 10690.41 hectares by 2026. Simultaneously, agricultural area is slotted to decrease from 12470 hectares to 7295.81 hectares, and lands under the Others (vacant, forest, hills, low-lying and waterbodies) category shrinks from 56507 hectares to 28147 hectares.

 

The hydrological ramifications of this re-zoning are dealt with in greater detail in another article I wrote recently about the Ennore creek area in Chennai’s north.⁸ Of the 3416.08 hectares allocated to ‘Special and Hazardous Industries’ in the CMA outside Chennai, a little less than 1000 hectares (2341 acres) falls just within three creekside villages of Athipattu, Vallur and Ennore. Wetlands, including 1500 acres of salt pans, 212 acres of fish farms and 317 acres of tidal waterbody, constitute nearly 90 per cent of the above area reserved for S&H industries. Even more land is sought to be freed up by the curiously named ‘river straightening project.’ The Kamarajar Port Ltd, a mini-navaratna Government of India company, is a key beneficiary of the proposed conversion of water to land.

 

Conventional interventions for dealing with rain involve flood control technologies and sundry hare-brained end-of-pipe measures that will do anything to avert disturbing the status quo. Take the case of the ELCOT IT SEZ in Sholinganallur. The massive and hydrologically disruptive software park is located inside the marshland at the mouth of a drain to a 250 square kilometre catchment. ELCOT is the perpetrator, not a victim of floods. But the government has proposed a Rs 22 crore project to construct a storm-water channel to drain the ELCOT area directly into the Kovalam creek. The area sought to be drained is a marsh. It is meant to retain water. Draining that water quickly may secure ELCOT from floods, but it will leave the larger region more vulnerable to water scarcity and salinity intrusion.

Countries like the Netherlands have learnt the hard way that in dealing with nature, humility is wisdom. Rather than flood control, they are talking of controlled flooding. In the place of flood-inducing river straightening projects, the Dutch have launched a multi-decade $3 billion ‘Room for the River’ programme that returns to the river what was its to begin with.⁹ This is not a cop-out. Rather it is an acknowledgement of the inevitability of rising sea levels and the inexorable push that water is capable of exerting.

 

At the very least, the city should not convert any more wetlands. It would be even better if it begins to undo some of the damage. If hutments are to be removed, they need to be relocated on dry land within the city, not expelled to the margins. More important from a floods perspective is the removal of elite encroachers and the freeing up of the marshland in the south, and the Ennore creek to the north.

Politically this may be far more challenging than handing out engineering contracts for construction of storm water drains. But fighting nature is not an option. One way or the other, nature will prevail. It is all well to talk about a balance between environment and development. But regardless of our development needs, the environment will do no balancing.

 

Footnotes:

1. ‘Tokyo at High Risk of Devastating Floods, Experts Say’, Tokyo Times, 21 September 2015. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/09/21/national/tokyo-high-risk-devastating-floods-experts-say/#.V3NGg5fPFyQ Downloaded on 29.06.2016.

2. A. Srivathsan and K. Lakshmi, ‘Chennai’s Vanishing Waterbodies’, 6 June 2011. http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/chennais-vanishing-waterbodies/article 2099315.ece. Downloaded 30.06.2016.

3. ‘Environment Ministry Issues Final Notification for Mumbai Coastal Road’, The Indian Express 30 December 2015. http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/environment-ministry-issues-final-notification-for-coastal-road-in-mumbai/Downloaded 29.06.2016.

4. Karen Coelho and Nithya Raman, ‘Salvaging and Scapegoating: Slum Evictions on Chennai’s Waterways’, Economic and Political Weekly XLV(21), 22 May 2010. http://www.environmentportal.in/files/Salvaging% 20and%20scapegoating.pdf Downloaded 29.06.2016.

5. ‘Final Feasibility Report for 4-lane Elevated Expressway from Chennai Port to Maduravoyal on NH-4’, Wilbur Smith Associates for NHAI, New Delhi, 2008.

6. Census of India data, cited in S.P. Sekar and S. Kanchanamala, ‘An Analysis of Growth Dynamics in Chennai Metropolitan Area’, Institute of Town Planners, India Journal 8-4, October-December 2011. http://www.itpi.org. in/files/oct3_11.pdf Downloaded 30.06.2016.

7. ‘Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission: Overview.’ Ministry of Urban Development and Ministry of Urban Employment & Poverty Alleviation, Government of India. Undated. http://jnnurm.nic.in/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/PMSpeech OverviewE.pdf Downloaded 29.06.2016.

8. Nityanand Jayaraman, ‘Chennai May Just Be Masterminding its Next Flooding Disaster’, The Wire, 21 June 2016. http://thewire.in/44393/chennai-may-just-be-masterminding-its-next-flooding-disaster/Downloaded 01.07.2016.

9. Michael Kimmelman, ‘Going with the Flow’, The New York Times, 13 February 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/arts/design/flood-control-in-the-netherlands-now-allows-sea-water-in.html?_r=0 Downloaded on 28.06.2016.