It’s the season of woes in Mumbai when many parts of the city are submerged, services disrupted and lives lost to punishing rains. Every year, the rains bring out the city’s vulnerabilities to the surface with agencies like BMC and MMRDA, and the Railways reduced to helplessness. And, this is no ordinary metro under the spotlight, but the country’s financial capital, the Maximum City, so to speak, with its inglorious contradictions.

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In their zeal to expand, the architects of modern Mumbai had sealed the fate of the city by overlooking a crucial fact. It’s an island joined artificially by reclaiming land from the sea, and hence, needs a proper drainage system for rainwater to flow out into the sea.

The insatiable appetite for real estate, whetted further by the mindless construction of infrastructure, have had disastrous effects. Floodplains have disappeared; stretches of mangrove that work as a natural bulwark against a raging sea have been swallowed up; and rivers like Mithi lost their catchment areas. Alongside, rampant illegal encroachment and mismanagement of solid waste have blocked storm-water drains and natural drainage outlets like the Mithi.

High tides during monsoon transform the city into a waterworld. Mumbai is on the brink of a disaster, but nobody, not least civic authorities, seems to realise the enormity of the situation. The generous glimpses of the city’s dystopian future have elicited piecemeal responses. The banning of plastic, the chief cause of choked drains, is a half-hearted measure that may not make a radical difference in Mumbai, which generates at least 7,500 metric tonnes of waste everyday, nine per cent of which comprises plastic products.

The July 2005 deluge had brought in some changes, but those can hardly be called enduring, given the mounting odds that the fourth-most populous city in the world, with 22.05 million inhabitants, pose to civic authorities. Forget turning into Shanghai, BMC can’t even fix potholes that turn into death-traps for motorists. Despite knowing that monsoon is the most trying time for the citizens and that the quantum of rainfall will fluctuate every year, the custodians of the city have failed to rise to the challenge.

Just this one month of monsoon has claimed 38 lives and injured 56 more. These would include bridge collapse, tree-fall accidents, death by potholes, diseases like leptospirosis, and drowning in the sea. In many ways, Mumbai offers the ideal picture of what Indian metros should do to avoid similar sufferings.

It’s a classic case of an urban nightmare unfolding in broad daylight. The tremendous pressure on its fragile infrastructure has long been showing. Barring parts of South Mumbai, which were planned and developed in the colonial rule, the rest of the city has mushroomed as if to defy urban planning. Perhaps, the biggest banes of the city are its population and lack of foresight of civic authorities to foresee the future. Mumbai is a trap for seductive betrayal.