Cosmetic change is not going to make India a superpower.

By: Rakesh Agrawal, ‘Ridh’

For a very long time, we have been playing havoc nature as we built icons of modern development: multistoried apartments, shopping malls, multiplexes and even airports at wetlands, riverbeds, ponds and choked all natural water outlets, so now nature is taking its revenge. And, although it always rains in India for about three months, we don’t have a long-term planning to deal with it, except re-naming our cities.

The consequences were clearly visible yesterday & a day before when unprecedented traffic jams in the millennium city, Gurgaon, now officially, Gurugram, forced citizen to peddle through waist-deep water and forced the administration to impose section 144 of the IPC, a colonial measure of crowd-control. Elsewhere, similar scenes were repeated. India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore, now called Bengaluru became a huge pond where people were catching fish on the streets and boats, instead of SUVs were playing and India’s financial capital, Bombay, now Mumbai, it water everywhere.

Also, only last year in October, Madras, now rechristened as Chennai, was the reminiscent of a Bihar village during the monsoon, as it has water, water and water everywhere, with 246 people losing their lives.

Clearly, cosmetic change is not going to make India a wanna be superpower.

But, why only India? Flood created similar scene in Beijing, London, Paris and even in American cities.

The Eiffel Tower in front of the flooded Seine River in Paris on June 3 2016 looked like a mast in a lake as the Seine raised to its highest level in decades and just a few days later, South-east England faces further thunderstorms overnight after downpours disrupted voting in the EU referendum, flooded homes and caused severe travel delays.

Even in the United States, cities keep flooding as a State of Emergency was declared by the mayor of Huntington, West Virginia, after the city was hit by flash flooding after storms and heavy rain late on 14 July, 2016.

A study has found that the increased flooding in US coastal cities caused by climate change as the coastal flooding days have more than doubled in US since 1980s (See:https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/23/us-coastal-cities-flooding-climate-change-sea-level-study).

China is in a no better condition either as its very capital, Beijing was hit by a twenty-hour downpour on July 21, 2012, and within a day of the flooding, 56,933 people had been evacuated, while the floodwaters killed 79 people, causing at least 10 billion Yuan (US $1.6 billion) in damages and destroying at least 8,200 homes.

As the paradigm of development has been globalized and the same model is followed everywhere that is development at all cost; meaning replacing forests by concrete jungle, turning lakes, riverbeds and riverfronts and ponds into monuments of modern civilization and creating & aggravating global warming through anthropogenic activities, results are also similar across the globe.

But, Indian cities are the worst hit, thanks to the lack of a long-term urban planning and ostrich like response by the policymakers and administration.