Full Text | 'Planning in Mumbai has Come to Mean Only Real Estate Schemes'

In a recent episode of The Wire Talks, Sidharth Bhatia and urban planner Hussain Indorewala critiqued Mumbai’s infrastructure failures, observing how city planning has prioritised real estate over essential water and sewage systems. This has ended up amplifying flood risks amid heavy monsoons.

The following is the full text of the talk, transcribed by Parvani Baroi.

Sidharth Bhatia: Hello and welcome to The Wire Talks. I am Sidharth Bhatia. On 26th May, Mumbai was flooded after a shower that paralysed the city. Many parts were submerged underwater. Trains slowed down and there were traffic jams everywhere. What was unusual was that water collected on the streets and parts of South Mumbai where flooding rarely happens. Every year the civic authorities say they are fully prepared for all contingencies and that they will ensure that life goes on as normal. But like clockwork, Mumbai just cannot handle heavy showers, especially at the beginning of the monsoon season. This year, the monsoon hit Mumbai almost two weeks in advance. And you can imagine how it was. What is the cause of this flooding? Can the drains not handle it? Is the city growing in a haphazard manner with too much construction? Is climate change to blame for changing monsoon patterns? And most importantly, what does the future hold? To address some of these questions, my guest today is Hussain Indorewala, teacher and urban researcher.

Sidharth Bhatia: He teaches planning theory, housing and humanities at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture. His research work has focused on urban history, infrastructure planning, politics of land and housing, and sustainable transport. Hussain Indorewala, welcome to The Wire Talks.

Hussain Indorewala: Hi Sidharth, happy to be here.

Sidharth Bhatia: You know, as citizens of Mumbai, we are used to flooded streets during the rains. We are used to traffic jams. We are used to trains getting stuck. But even so, did what happened on 26th May surprise you?

Hussain Indorewala: Well, not really. I think every time there are floods in Mumbai, people think about the problems in very specific terms - in terms of what is happening in that particular year. But I think in order to understand this problem a little comprehensively, one needs to go back and look at the 2005 floods in the city and what really happened after that. So almost everybody in Mumbai has probably heard of the very famous Madhav Chitale Committee report which was released in 2006. However, very few people seem to have actually read it carefully. And this is not to say that the report was flawless. It had many limitations, but it had some very useful suggestions.

Hussain Indorewala: The Chitale Committee report was significant in many ways. First of all, it invited presentations from a range of institutions and individuals which included state officials, planners, engineers, environmentalists, social scientists, activists, and much more. But it recognised the problem of flooding as a planning and governance failure, not simply a result of poor quality flood management infrastructure. The committee diagnosed that the existing storm water drainage system in Mumbai was designed with certain very limited assumptions. The assumptions being that rainfall intensity is 25 mm per hour on average and the assumption of what they call a coefficient of runoff - meaning how much of the rainwater gets absorbed by the ground and how much of it flows over the ground into drainage channels.

Hussain Indorewala: So they assumed that the coefficient of runoff in Mumbai is 0.5, meaning 50% of the water gets absorbed. Now these assumptions are totally meaningless in Mumbai. In 2005 there was 125 mm per hour rainfall and the coefficient of runoff in Mumbai is close to 100%. Meaning that there is almost negligible infiltration of rainwater. What this implies is that we need to pay attention and plan for two or three things. One is the higher frequency and intensity of rainfall events. The second is the measures to reduce the quantum and pace of stormwater runoff. And the third is infrastructure required to cope with stormwater runoff.

Hussain Indorewala: To do these things requires serious reforms and the Chitale committee was very clear on those reforms. So what they said was that there need to be some fundamental governance and planning reforms in Mumbai like replacing the commissioner system with a mayor and council system so that elected representatives rather than bureaucrats are entrusted with the planning functions. They recommended that the metropolitan planning committee should be set up. It is there on paper but it doesn't function. And that there were three regional boards that were part of the formation of the Metropolitan Planning Authority in Mumbai. One for water resources, one for transportation and one for housing and ecology. These three boards need to be revived.

Hussain Indorewala: Of course, all of these suggestions were simply ignored. Crucially, many of the Chitale committee's recommendations on the specific issue of flood prevention themselves were not implemented. So to give two or three examples, one of the recommendations was that the city needs to restore the existing degraded rivers and riverbanks to initiate the recovery of urban ecosystems. Now restoration of rivers and riverbanks means bringing the ecosystem into its previous known condition. This does not mean beautification of the kinds being undertaken around the Mithi river or the kind of concrete embankments being built along the streams in Aarey. On the contrary, it implies that the causes of pollution in the river due to effluent solid waste and chemical discharge has to be identified and addressed.

Hussain Indorewala: It implies that the rivers need to be de-concretised and de-constricted to flow as close to its natural course as possible. It also implies that the riparian buffer or the areas adjacent to the rivers, the land adjacent to the rivers or the interface between the land and the river need to be restored to its natural vegetation. And it also means that wherever possible there should be holding ponds or flood plains that need to be created along these rivers and obviously none of these measures have also been undertaken.

Sidharth Bhatia: We'll come to many of these subsequently but you know, my point is, as you speak as somebody who has read the report, read several other reports etc. But therefore I'm asking - was this inevitable that something like this would happen? Because one of the things that many people remarked was that certain parts of Mumbai which - what we call South Mumbai - which was built by the British 100 years ago etc., that got flooded. Is it because that has now simply become - I won't say useless but - outdated or broken?

Hussain Indorewala: Now if the assumption of the drainage system was that the average rainfall per hour is 25 mm and the rainfall intensity as well as frequency is increasing, it implies that the existing storm water drainage system is outdated. It needs to be upgraded. Right. Incidentally, what is also interesting in this is that there is the storm water drainage project in Mumbai. It's called BRIMSTOWAD. It was initiated in 1991, which was also a response to a flooding event that took place in 1985 in the city. So one can see that many of these responses or projects like BRIMSTOWAD are initiated after a disaster rather than in anticipation of one.

Hussain Indorewala: So in 1991 BRIMSTOWAD was set up but it almost languished for many years till the 2005 floods when the Chitale committee once again emphasised that BRIMSTOWAD should be funded and it should be implemented. In recent years in 2018 there was a BRIMSTOWAD 2 and a master plan has been made. But the implementation is still far from adequate. So that is definitely a problem with the storm water drainage infrastructure. But what is also important is to look at some of the other factors that are contributing to the problem of flooding. And I think the Chitale Committee report was very clear on that - that one should not look at it only as an infrastructural issue but to look at it as a planning as well as a governance issue.

Sidharth Bhatia: When you say governance of course, there has long been talk that a city like Mumbai now needs an elected mayor, elected representatives to run. How do you think that will really make a difference compared to let's say a municipality which is headed by a commissioner and run by - also the municipal corporation also has elected representatives. What's the key difference here?

Hussain Indorewala: I think obviously when you have elected representatives, elected representatives are at least in theory more responsive to the public as compared to bureaucrats appointed by the government. They would most likely be more responsive to priorities which are not simply the priorities that shape existing planning in the city. They would be more responsive in terms of when there are flooding events or disasters which need to be managed. Having elected representatives would probably be more responsive to the needs of their constituencies.

Hussain Indorewala: So I think of course governance by itself is not the answer but to a large extent what has happened is much of the administrative decision-making in Bombay is done by administrators not by elected representatives. And as you can see in the past three-four years we don't even have councillors anymore, which means that a lot of the priorities of the development in Bombay are shared by the state government and the bureaucrats that they have appointed, which is essentially what the Chitale committee was trying to hint at in terms of these governance reforms.

Sidharth Bhatia: So basically you are saying devolution - and a city like Mumbai needs a governance structure including an elected mayor directly which will have the power to run the city but also the responsibility and this has been talked about for years. Now, as somebody who knows this city and you too, I presume that this is something that the state government would simply not want. It doesn't want it.

Hussain Indorewala: And it's also important to highlight that this commissioner system was set up during the colonial period. And it very well suited the colonial authorities to administer and run the city through officials rather than elected representatives and the system hasn't been reformed since then. So these governance reforms are in the spirit of the 74th Amendment to the Constitution and devolution of powers and so on. But again it's important to highlight that this by itself is not a magic bullet. There are other considerations as well which one needs to think about.

Sidharth Bhatia: Tell me, the average citizen now is a little perplexed and is noticing that every part of Mumbai has been dug up for new and newer and newer towers. I mean when you come into a place like say Bandra or Worli you see construction sites all over the place. Do you think that that plays a role in storm water draining? There are two parts to the question here. Do you think that this kind of constant digging also has an effect on water being drained out? And two, which is linked to it, is when these are completed do you think the existing infrastructure is capable of handling it? So A and B.

Hussain Indorewala: No. So when people talk about planning they generally expect certain things, but what is important to highlight is that planning in Mumbai has come to mean something very different. In Mumbai, planning means a periodic exercise that the BMC undertakes of making land use reservations, creating regulations for different kinds of real estate schemes and prescribing floor space index and TDR rules or these development rules to facilitate those schemes. Now why is all this important to think about? Because it's not only about the construction that is taking place. The construction is facilitated by a certain kind of regime of planning.

Hussain Indorewala: If we look at the planning legislation in Maharashtra, the MRTP Act, the law prescribes that a plan should think about land use zoning, reservation for public uses, transport infrastructure, water supply, drainage, sewage, flood control, environmental conservation and much more. So it has a comprehensive planning framework. But of course in Bombay many of these things are relegated to different kinds of sectoral projects and are not really part of the development plan itself. They don't flow from the development plan.

Hussain Indorewala: Now what has happened in recent years is that because of the changes in planning rules, the real estate industry has been provided many possibilities for these kinds of projects that you mentioned - the high FSI or high-rise construction and so on. Now the first thing to think about is: is the digging itself something that is causing flooding? Probably, because insofar as the kind of construction activities constricts the flow of water into drainage channels and obstruction within the drainage channels and so on, it could create certain kinds of localised flooding.

Hussain Indorewala: Whether construction itself is going to - once the construction is done whether the flooding problem will continue - very likely given the way in which construction is being done. So what happens with this high intensity development that we are seeing around us is that the amount of open area in the city which allows for infiltration of groundwater is being reduced around buildings. The what is called the marginal open spaces. These areas are generally being paved over. So the percolation of groundwater does not happen. So more and more water runs off the surface.

Hussain Indorewala: Now the water has to go somewhere and if you don't have a robust enough storm water drainage system, which we don't, you are automatically going to create the conditions for urban floods.

Sidharth Bhatia: So the sheer number of new buildings coming up will have to plug into the existing drainage and storm water system to say nothing of other infrastructure. We are just talking about flooding and water drainage at the moment but we are not talking about so many other things - the roads for example, road street areas, the number of new cars that will come out on the street in a particular neighbourhood - and none of this is being planned. In your assessment is there a comprehensive plan to kind of create such a modern system that all these buildings can be accommodated in?

Hussain Indorewala: I think that the problem is not really - it's not really a question of modern infrastructure or modern development which is unsuitable for this kind of which is creating these problems. I think the issue generally is that in Mumbai apart from real estate development, when you look at the kinds of projects that are being undertaken whether they are these sectoral projects, transport projects are an overwhelming priority, everything else is considered unimportant unless some crisis or disaster creates public outcry. These things are usually ignored.

Hussain Indorewala: For instance, the sewage disposal system in Mumbai. There's very little thinking about that. Water supply, very little thinking about it. But there is a lot of expenditure on extremely expensive car-oriented infrastructure projects or the metro system. So the problem is not so much about the real estate industry or the construction per se but that many of the supporting infrastructure that is essential in the city from the perspective of the people who live in the city is not a priority for the planners.

Hussain Indorewala: And what you see in the form of everyday crisis that are faced by citizens are essentially a reflection of that. Much of what we are seeing in the problems that we are seeing in Mumbai are a series of planning failures which will continue as long as planning is completely oriented towards real estate development.

Sidharth Bhatia: In fact, this brings me to the question that I'm sure is in the minds of many, many people. We've got this shiny new coastal road built at a cost of 20,000 crores apparently by the municipal corporation which constantly says they do not have the money, which constantly finds it difficult to pave even normal roads. But this shiny new coastal road end to end which was built for even by the best estimates not more than about 75 to 80,000 cars a day. And it's been welcomed by car users but the number of users is very, very low. Now it is skirting the coastal area of the city. If you look at certain parts it's completely built over, there's a lot of concretisation. Do you think the coastal road will also play a role or has played a role in stopping channels of water drainage?

Hussain Indorewala: It's an interesting question because the coastal road was made possible by an amendment to the CRZ regulation - the Coastal Regulation Zone notification - which is a regulation and we can talk about that more. But the coastal road project was created via an amendment to the CRZ notification of 2011. In 2011, the proposal for the coastal road was studied by a committee and the committee recommended building a reclaimed road instead of a road on stilts saying that it would be a cheaper option. Now there's a lot of material in print about the utterly ludicrous reasoning in that joint technical committee report so I won't get into that here but one of the barriers to constructing the project was the CRZ.

Hussain Indorewala: So what they did is instead of modifying the proposal of the coastal road project they amended the regulation - the CRZ regulation itself - which happened in 2015 and after that almost 100 hectares of new land has been created along the western coast of the island city. Now the reports last week about flooding in the island city - it's possible that the reclamation has contributed to the flooding which is what many people have been saying is likely to happen. But of course this should be studied carefully before any firm conclusion is reached.

Hussain Indorewala: But it is possible that reclamation itself has contributed to the kind of flooding that we saw this year. And as you said that's a typical result of development thinking which is car-oriented rather than oriented towards other things.

Sidharth Bhatia: So if zoning laws have been made so much easier for builders, if new constructions are going up, if there is a governance issue, if the infrastructure is also a little unprepared, would you say that this is now an annual affair or even more than annual affair several times during the monsoon? Are we going to be living with this kind of flooding or any kind of flooding over the next many years?

Hussain Indorewala: Well, I mean there are ways that one can think about to reduce both the risks and the severity of these flooding incidents. There are - every time there is a flooding event the authorities are very quick to say that this was excess rainfall, unexpected rainfall, it's a natural disaster but these have roots in the way in which the city has been shaped. They are not - they may be triggered by certain kinds of natural events. But there are very clear reasons why this is taking place and as long as these problems are not fixed, this will be a yearly problem.

Hussain Indorewala: But there are ways to address some of these challenges. So first of all I think the easiest thing that could have been done is that some of the more useful suggestions of the Chitale committee could be implemented. That would be almost like a no-brainer. But apart from this we need to think about, first of all what we need is that we need to undertake a careful documentation of all of the undeveloped areas in the city and natural ecosystems. So to do a kind of ecosystems mapping in the city. Areas such as plantations, groves, fields, wetlands, salt marshes, ponds, streams, they need to be preserved as infrastructure for flood prevention.

Hussain Indorewala: And we have to do ecological planning of these areas to enhance their capacity to function as flood prevention systems. We would also need to undertake ecological restoration to all of the ecosystems that have degraded should be allowed to regenerate or should be helped to regenerate. We can take - we need to set up various kinds of development controls to enable permeation which means de-concretising pavements, water collection and harvesting, de-concretisation of water channels, replacing hard paved areas with permeable surfaces. All of this will improve the capacity of the soil to absorb rainwater.

Hussain Indorewala: And we also then need good engineering, well thought through engineering solutions which are based on realistic assumptions of increasing rainfall intensity, of the kind of volumes of water that are going to run off and how much - what kind of storm water drainage system network is needed. Clean unobstructed rivers and strategies for disaster management and mitigation. I think many of these would definitely help reduce some of the yearly events that we are witnessing.

Sidharth Bhatia: Hussain, if I may say so, and I think I hope you take it in the right spirit. That's a very utopian way of looking at things. The way the city is already hurtling towards things that are completely the opposite of these things. Now I say this as much as a citizen as you that many of these things are simply not built into the policy makeup of the establishment at this stage. So I personally think all these ideas are excellent. But the development concept and policy, the ideas that are in the heads of our policy planners will have to undergo fundamental changes. Don't you think?

Hussain Indorewala: Yes, it's true. But obviously all of this - it sounds utopian but the question is insofar as these decisions are outside the control of the public and people in the city they sound utopian. But the question is which is what we discussed earlier - with the kind of public engagement in planning decision-making, with the kind of pressure that people can place on their governments there are many things that can happen. The impossible can become possible. I think the problem has never been a lack of good ideas, the problem has always been the unwillingness to implement good ideas.

Hussain Indorewala: So I think whether it will happen or not really depends on what people do with the kind of information and knowledge that they have.

Sidharth Bhatia: As a coastal city, there is also the possible danger to not just Mumbai but other cities as well of serious effects of climate change, right? I mean keeping aside what has been happening with alarming regularity every year. Keeping aside all the construction that is going on, all the lopsided planning, do you think that there is thinking in policy circles or academic circles about the effects of climate change in the next few years?

Hussain Indorewala: Well, I think there is - I mean the Maharashtra government prepared a climate action plan for Mumbai in 2022. And it definitely had some useful recommendations for adaptation and mitigation such as some of the things that I mentioned about increasing permeable surfaces. It spoke about conservation of green cover, distribution of water and a whole range of other things. The problem is that the climate action plan to a large extent was based on a kind of a what is called a concept plan or a kind of a recommendatory exercise rather than a statutory plan.

Hussain Indorewala: What would have been useful and what is necessary in fact is to undertake climate action as a part of the statutory planning framework which means it should be very much part of the development plan and the regional plans that are made in the city. But the climate action plan was made after the development plan was sanctioned and Mumbai's development plan as you mentioned, as you point out, is antithetical to climate action. There were many other problems with the climate action plan. Some of those are - there is some literature on it.

Hussain Indorewala: But one of the things which was most shocking about the climate action plan was its expectation and preparation for sea level rise. It relied on the politically influenced Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rather than more scientifically realistic assessments. But it also remarked that we don't have adequate coastal data for the Mumbai coast. So it is difficult to establish sea level rise as a current risk for the city, which basically means that if you can't measure the problem it doesn't exist. So for a coastal city like Mumbai there has to be a very careful assessment of the probability and severity of impacts due to global warming.

Hussain Indorewala: So what kind of climate action does Mumbai need? One can think of many things which could be done. Again, I'm going to list some ideas which you're going to call utopian but I think I should list them anyway. One thing you could do is to re-engineer many of our car-oriented transport infrastructure projects to reduce fossil fuel dependence. We could switch to alternative sources of energy by harvesting solar and wind. We could make land more permeable by creating more open spaces.

Hussain Indorewala: We could reduce paved surfaces and concretised surfaces in the city. We could make luxury consumption more expensive to reduce carbon emissions which are essentially largely contributed by the wealthy. We could increase the modal share of public transport. And I think what is also very important to think about now is the possibilities for 10, 20, 30 years later when you have to think about what is called in the climate action literature as managed retreat - resettlement of populations in safer areas that are less vulnerable to sea level rise. I mean all of these things should be very seriously thought about at the city level if we have to prepare for all of the most serious impacts of climate change.

Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah. Just on that one point, the reason why I think - the reason why I say utopian is that I'll take one of these suggestions that you mentioned and that is increase in public transport and in fact what one is seeing, which is a tragedy, is that Mumbai's public transport system which was one of the best - the buses especially - is being slowly withering away. And that could be by design, that could be by accident or whatever, but it's withering away. Now if that is something that we can see right in front of us then many of the other slightly more - which will require far more effort - are they going to be considered or implemented or even made part of the statutory process?

Sidharth Bhatia: So I think to the average citizen these may be somewhat instinctive. They may have an instinctive understanding but may be a bit far away. But the surprising part is that the policy planners - political and bureaucrats - have completely oriented themselves in one direction and that gives a sense of pessimism towards where we are heading. Incidentally Hussain, as it happened last week, there was another flooding in faraway Gujarat. Now of course that's not a coastal city but when you see that flooding or when you see landslides in Uttarakhand you realise that the emphasis on building more and more and concretisation more and more seems to be a process much beyond Bombay. I wonder whether the Bombay model or Mumbai model is now becoming popular all over the country. This is just a kind of - I don't know whether you care to talk about this.

Hussain Indorewala: No I think - I think generally speaking the three things that I mentioned in the beginning in terms of the causes of urban floods would explain a lot of - I mean many cities in India have been experiencing, around the world in fact have been experiencing very serious urban floods. And it is a combination of these three things - the increasing intensity and frequency of heavy rainfall events. That's the natural part of it.

Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah, that's the natural part of it.

Hussain Indorewala: That to a large extent is a result of climate change. The other thing is what you mentioned about the construction activities and what happens as a result of these construction activities is that the amount of water that can be absorbed in the form of infiltration is reduced. So much of the water runs off. And then the third is infrastructure to be able to cope with the kind of runoff. If any of these three are - when these three come together in a way you have these serious flooding events.

Hussain Indorewala: So you need to improve the infrastructure for managing storm water. You need to create more open spaces and permeable areas in the city. And both these things have to be done with an eye on the kind of increasing unpredictability of the climate system.

Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah, those are pithily explained. Thank you so much for your assessment, your explanation of what ails Mumbai and the fears that it could grow but optimism that things could change. I hope I lean towards the last one - optimism that things could change. So thank you very much for giving us this view of what happened in Mumbai and what - what we saw was the symptom but obviously there is something fundamentally underlying it. So thank you once again, thank you for joining us and that was Hussain Indorewala, academic, teacher and urban researcher, telling us about, explaining to us what happened in Mumbai on 26th May and how if we don't watch out and take some fundamental policy steps, things could get - the same thing could happen over and over again.

Sidharth Bhatia: We'll be back once again next time with another guest. Till then it's goodbye from Sidharth Bhatia and the rest of The Wire Talks team.

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