Year after year, the monsoon arrives as though it were an unexpected guest. Year after year, governments—state and civic alike—act surprised. And year after year, citizens drown in the same cycle of chaos, filth, and misery. If there is one thing that the recent spell of heavy rains has once again exposed, it is not merely nature’s fury, but India’s chronic governance failure. And nowhere is this failure more glaring than in Mumbai—the so-called financial capital of the country, which collapses with the first downpour like a sandcastle at high tide. Mumbai, which prides itself on being India’s gateway to the world, becomes an open sewer during the monsoons. Railway tracks vanish underwater, arterial roads turn into rivers, homes are flooded, and lives are lost. This is not the aftermath of a cyclone or an unprecedented cloudburst. This is the result of regular, predictable monsoon rain. Yet, the city, with its trillion-dollar economy and “world-class aspirations,” is brought to its knees every single time. The excuse is always the same: “record rainfall,” as though rainfall in the monsoon is a phenomenon that arrived unannounced. The problem is not the rain. The problem is a criminal lack of planning, accountability, and political will. Mumbai’s drainage system dates back to the British era, designed for a population and an urban sprawl that belong to another century. Successive governments have announced multi-thousand-crore “stormwater drain upgrades,” but the money has vanished faster than the floodwaters recede. Citizens are left to wade through waist-deep water and choke on the stench of their rulers’ corruption. And it is not just Mumbai. Across states—be it Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, or Gurugram—the story is the same. The so-called “tech capital” of Bengaluru drowns under a few hours of rain because encroachments have eaten up its lakes and storm channels. Chennai floods because wetlands were turned into concrete jungles with the blessings of political and corporate cronies. Delhi becomes a swamp because its drains are clogged with plastic, silt, and indifference. Gurugram, built as the gleaming face of corporate India, comes apart at the seams, its skyscrapers surrounded by knee-deep water. Hyderabad, meanwhile, has mastered the art of blaming “nature’s fury” while allowing lakes and catchment areas to be destroyed for vote-bank housing projects.
The tragedy is that none of this is new. The 2005 Mumbai deluge should have been a wake-up call. The devastating Chennai floods of 2015 should have changed urban planning forever. The recent Bengaluru floods should have forced a rethink on real estate greed. Instead, the pattern remains unbroken: politicians rush to site visits in SUVs, civic officials mumble about “extraordinary rainfall,” compensation cheques are announced, and the cycle of neglect continues. At the heart of this is a deeper rot: urban India is governed by utterly unaccountable agencies. Municipal corporations are riddled with corruption, state governments treat civic management as a sideshow, and urban planning is dictated not by science or necessity but by contractors and political benefactors. Environmental warnings are ignored, expert committees are shelved, and illegal constructions are regularized. The result is a disaster-in-waiting that requires just a heavy downpour to be triggered. The cost is not just economic, though that itself runs into thousands of crores. The cost is human lives. Every monsoon, people die in waterlogged subways, collapse under landslides, or are electrocuted by open wires submerged in water. These deaths are not “accidents.” They are murders, committed in slow motion by a system that refuses to learn. India cannot claim the mantle of a rising global power while its cities collapse under predictable rain. Smart cities cannot float on sewage. Financial hubs cannot drown every July. And people cannot be treated as expendable victims of “acts of God” when the true culprit is decades of institutional apathy. The monsoon is not an enemy. It is India’s lifeline. But our governments have turned it into an annual nightmare. Until accountability is fixed, funds are spent where they shouldn’t be, and urban planning is wrested from the clutches of corruption, the rains will continue to wash away not just our roads and homes, but the very credibility of our governance. For Mumbai and for India, the message is stark: the waterlogging is not the failure of drains—it is the flooding of incompetence.
