Srinagar’s recurring urban floods reflect failures of planning and accountability, not the fury of nature
The scenes that unfolded in Srinagar this week were dispiriting precisely because they were familiar. Within minutes of heavy rain, large parts of the summer capital, including Babademb, Eidgah, Khanyar, Safa Kadal and Naid Kadal, went under sheets of water. Vehicles stalled, commuters waded through contaminated water, and traffic came to a standstill. That a city projected as a Smart City cannot withstand a routine monsoon spell is an indictment not of the weather but of those who administer it. The warning signs were recent and unambiguous. In June, a downpour lasting barely an hour produced the same paralysis, and a 60-year-old woman was electrocuted at Naid Kadal when she held a metal pole to steady herself in knee-deep water. To describe that death as an accident is to evade responsibility. It was the foreseeable outcome of choked drains, broken manholes, encroachments on natural water channels, and sustained official indifference. The administration’s record on paper is impressive: a storm-water network of 650 km, 104 permanent dewatering stations, Smart City drainage corridors, and new sewage treatment plants at Brarinambal and Chattabal. Yet each spell of rain exposes the gap between announcement and outcome. Pumps are deployed late, desilting remains cosmetic, and construction over natural nallahs continues largely unchecked.
The costs of this failure are neither abstract nor evenly distributed. They fall hardest on residents of downtown and low-lying colonies, on shopkeepers whose stocks are ruined, on daily commuters, on children kept from school, and on the elderly and persons with disabilities confined indoors. Stagnant water carries the risk of disease; exposed live wires turn flooded streets into hazards. What was once dismissed as seasonal inconvenience has hardened into a recurring public health and safety crisis, with economic losses that go unmeasured because no one is asked to account for them. That is the heart of the matter. Srinagar’s problem is not a shortage of projects but a shortage of accountability. The questions are straightforward. Who certified substandard work? Why are drains not desilted before the monsoon rather than after streets flood? Why do corridors upgraded at considerable public expense under the Smart City mission remain among the first to submerge? With the Meteorological Department forecasting continued wet weather, the administration cannot treat drainage as a seasonal afterthought. It must audit completed works independently, publish desilting schedules and hold contractors and supervising officers to them, remove encroachments from natural drainage channels with due process but without indefinite delay, and ensure year-round maintenance rather than crisis-time deployment. Urban flooding is now a recurring feature of Indian cities, but its persistence in a city with Srinagar’s topography of wetlands and natural channels, many of them built over, is a policy choice, not fate. Until the government matches its press releases with enforcement, every shower will continue to expose the distance between the city Srinagar claims to be and the city its residents are forced to live in.
