The buck stopsat city governments

Climate change impacts are becoming perceptible and pervasive. The race for mindless development in the neoliberal economic era is taking a toll on human life in cities. The blatant flouting of existing norms and poor urban administration is like twisting the knife in the wound. Cities need to adapt and fix the broken system before it’s too late.

Cities are an inalienable part of our modern living. In a neoliberal economy, almost everyone has something to do with cities. Whether one is a farmer, labourer, student, or barber in a remote village, one is connected in some way or another with the urban ecosystem. Cities help sustain their businesses. Such formal or informal associations generate certain expectations in people regarding cities. When people move to cities or send their children there, they expect better living conditions, improved education, and health facilities, as well as fair economic opportunities, compared to villages.

Indian cities have managed to build education, health, and other necessary facilities to serve those coming to urban areas. However, these facilities are not in sync with overall urban development. Precious human lives are being lost in cities due to faulty, failing urban infrastructure and broken governance systems.

Three UPSC aspirants who had come to Delhi to prepare for civil service examinations drowned in the basement library of a coaching institute. The basement flooded so quickly that they had no chance of escaping. The dreams of these students and their families were shattered in a matter of minutes. They had different expectations from Delhi, but the city failed them.

The apex court took suo-moto cognisance of the incident and said that coaching centres have become “death chambers,” and these are playing with the lives of students. The Supreme Court added, ‘The recent unfortunate incident that took away the lives of three young aspirants who joined the coaching centres for their careers is an eye-opener for one and all.’ Later, the Delhi High Court transferred the investigation into the incident to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

A few days later, a mother and her infant fell into a waterlogged, semi-constructed open drain in East Delhi and drowned. Their bodies were recovered a few kilometres down the drain. Now, government agencies are busy debating as to which agency was responsible for the open drain. We have normalised these news coverages as such incidents happen so often and in almost every city during the monsoon season. What happened in Delhi’s Old Rajinder Nagar coaching institute or in East Delhi is just the tip of the iceberg of urban woes in our cities.

Who is to blame for the recurring incidents of people dying due to governance lapses and infrastructure failures in cities? Was the owner of the coaching institute or the building responsible? Should the top officials of the local government, who were responsible for managing and maintaining the drainage system, be blamed? Was the law enforcement agency responsible for failing to detect, penalise, and correct the building law violations? Or the driver of the SUV who allegedly drove past the coaching institute, causing waves of water to enter the basement and flood it? The answer is neither simple nor straightforward. In my opinion, many factors involving the roles of all these individuals—except the driver of the SUV—are responsible for the deaths of the three students. All of them failed in carrying out their responsibilities and in meeting expectations.

Hearing the aforementioned cases, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India have taken responsible government agencies to task. The court questioned how many lives must be lost before they understood the ‘gravity of the situation.’ The court even said, ‘The MCD is not serving anyone’s purpose. Let it be dissolved.’

The situation is severe. There is a need for local government agencies to own up to the responsibility and fix the urban management systems. They also need to adapt to changing environmental realities. The urban centres’ woes are exacerbated by the increasing negative impacts of climate change.

Climate change and cities

The issue of climate change and its impacts on cities comes to the fore after every natural disaster. On June 28, Delhi recorded 228.1 mm of rain in 24 hours, the highest in 26 years and the highest in the month of June since 1936. Residents of Delhi have witnessed extreme weather events this year. During the summer, the city experienced record-high temperatures, and the monsoon days are becoming wetter. Climate change is causing more rain in shorter spans of time.

Frequent and intense rains in short spells have wreaked havoc in India this monsoon season. From the national capital in the north to Wayanad district in the south, precious human lives have been lost. Undoubtedly, climate change has become a reality, but it cannot be used as an excuse for mismanagement and inefficiency. If the threats are well known, cities must fix their broken urban governance and implementation mechanisms. Delhi faced floods last year. There was a precedent, and city governments and other agencies should have prepared themselves better this year to manage such flood-like situations.

Many cities, if not most, around the world are facing the negative impacts of climate change in different ways. Cities are building their resilience to handle such situations, including several nature-based and technological adaptation measures. Climate change impacts are closely linked with fragile ecosystems and how local communities interact with them. Local governments, especially in the hilly regions of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and other parts of the country, have faced massive loss of human lives and destruction of property because local ecological conditions were not considered while undertaking development projects. When the disaster struck, the impact was deadly. Disasters like those of Joshimath, Shimla, and Wayanad are brewing in many places due to human-induced ecological disturbances. There are rules and regulations, but they are being ignored. For example, the Madhav Gadgil Expert Committee report on the Western Ghats raised many red flags on development in ecologically sensitive zones, but the suggestions made in the report were disregarded. The Wayanad landslide was catastrophic, and the areas marked ‘sensitive’ in the report were among the worst affected.

Implementation issues

To avoid any crisis in urban centres, there is no choice but to become resilient. But what does urban resilience mean? According to the ‘100 Resilient Cities’ project, urban resilience is the capacity of a city’s systems, businesses, institutions, communities, and individuals to survive, adapt, and thrive, no matter what chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. Urban resilience requires local governments to ensure the effective implementation of rules and regulations and to seriously consider scientific reports.

After the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, local governments were given certain responsibilities. Article 12 of the Indian Constitution assigns urban planning and town planning, along with the regulation of land use and construction of buildings, to local governments. There are 18 functions that are delegated to urban local bodies. City leaders and officials cannot pass the buck; it stops with local governments. The local government ecosystem only gets activated after accidents occur.

The solution does not lie in acting after accidents have occurred. A hoarding collapsed in Mumbai, killing several people, and local governments all over India swung into action. A couple of months ago, the local government launched a drive to seal hospitals in Delhi after a fire accident killed six infants in a private hospital. Now, many coaching institutes have been served notices or are being sealed. A total of 35 establishments using basements for commercial purposes were sealed, and more than 200 were sent notices. If there was such blatant, open violation of fire safety norms and building byelaws, why was there no monitoring mechanism?

According to a news report, Delhi has 583 registered coaching centres, but only 67 have Fire No Objection Certificates (NOCs). Not only this, but there is also a threat of collapse from dilapidated buildings. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) has a total of 12 zones: Centre, South, West, Najafgarh, Rohini, Civil Lines, Karol Bagh, SP-City, Keshavpuram, Narela, Shahdara North, and Shahdara South. According to an MCD report, the corporation had surveyed over 1.88 million buildings out of 2.57 million in the city as of June 17 this year. Of these, over 564 buildings were identified as needing repairs, and 40 were declared dangerous. According to a news report, there are 33 dangerous houses in the SP-City zone, four in Narela, and one each in the Keshavpuram, Karol Bagh, and Civil Lines zones.

After the Old Rajinder Nagar incident, in which a total of four people died and over a dozen were injured in different incidents of building collapse after rains, we cannot confirm if these incidents happened in the buildings declared ‘dangerous’. There is no confirmation of how many such buildings were evacuated after the MCD report was released.

When anyone wants to construct a commercial building in Delhi, it requires not fewer than 15 permissions and no-objection certificates. The Master Plan of Delhi 2021 (MPD 2021) and Unified Building Bylaws (UBBL) 2016 further provide clear guidelines on basement usage, yet violations are widespread. MPD 2021 specifies that basements in residential and commercial buildings can only be used for storage, parking, and utility areas. However, this is not an isolated case. Across Delhi, basements house gyms, restaurants, offices, and other establishments, creating potential hazards. The Delhi Master Plan-2041 clearly mentions these risks and the national capital’s vulnerabilities. It states, “Delhi falls in seismic zone four and is at high risk of earthquakes, fire outbreaks, and flooding. High built densities, poor quality, and the age of built stock further increase the vulnerability.”

The Indian government has laid down policies that require the involvement of the local community and stringent implementation. Now, discussions have emerged about new policies for regulating coaching institutes, but we need to revisit the issue. The problem lies not in lack of enough laws or inadequacy of these, but failure in faithful implementation of the laws we already have. If the existing laws had been implemented, we would not have lost the precious lives of bright UPSC aspirants in a flooded basement of a coaching centre in Delhi.

The failure of local governments to ensure compliance with existing rules and regulations remains a major issue in cities. There are some challenges that corporations face. Funds crunch, staff shortage, capacity of the employees to handle disasters, and increasing vulnerability of cities are often quoted.

However, we need a wider debate on why cities fail time and again and are unable to provide safe and secure living for citizens. Cities must get prepared before another disaster strikes.

Urban resilience is the capacity of a city’s systems, businesses, institutions, communities, and individuals to survive, adapt, and thrive, no matter what chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.