Root Privileges

Chennai

Cyclone Biparjoy and Chennai

When is a natural disaster a natural disaster? It began raining in Chennai last evening and hasn’t stopped as of this morning. But it’s been intermittent, with highly variable intensity. In my area, the wind has been feeble. I don’t know the situation in other areas because we haven’t had power since at least 3.45 am. My father tells me, from Bangalore, that early reports say Taramani (southern edge) and Nandanam (heart of the city) received 120 mm in the 24 hours until 5.30 am; Meenambakkam (outside the city, where the airport is) received 140 mm; and Nungambakkam (also heart of the city and near where I am) received 60 mm. @ChennaiRains has tweeted that the average rainfall in June in Chennai is 50 mm. Schools that were reopened just last week – after having been closed for two weeks longer than usual from the summer break due to a heatwave – have been closed again in four districts (Chengalpattu, Chennai, Kancheepuram, and Thiruvallur).

Does Chennai’s situation right now constitute a natural disaster? The consequences give that impression but the facts of the cause don’t. I’m sure some parts of the city have flooded as well, such as Pondy Bazaar (which, ironically, the state government had refurbished a few years ago under the ‘Smart Cities’ mission, including fitting a storm-water drain later found to have a critical design flaw) while many trees have been toppled. This is a city that has brought a state of disaster upon itself, like many other cities in India, thanks to their (oft-elected) leaders.

The problem at hand has two sides. One is that when a city has undermined its own ability to resist the worse consequences of an adverse natural event – such as receiving thrice the expected amount of rainfall for a month within 24 hours – it’s difficult to know what precipitated the disasterness, the state of experiencing a disaster: the city’s poor infrastructure or the intensity of the natural event. Determining exactly which one to blame is a nearly impossible problem to solve but attempting it could reveal, in the process, the most pressing problems to address at the local level. For example, right opposite my house is a vendor of construction materials who tends to close the nearest storm-water drain when loading or unloading sand to/from trucks, causing puddles of water to stagnate on the road, especially over some nasty potholes. There’s also a very rusted transformer at one end of the road and a sewage pipe that has burst at the other end. My block also doesn’t have power because I’m told a feeder line tripped in the night. But more fundamentally, this blame-apportionment exercise – the aggregate of all the local problems, for example – can be useful to piece together the true contributions of urban dysfunction to the city’s current disasterness, and contrast that with what the city’s and the state’s political leaders will soon claim the “actual problem” was, and attempt to take credit for “addressing” it.

The other side of the problem is that, thanks to climate change, we’re required to constantly update the way we think about disasters. For example, The Hindu has a good editorial today on India’s response to Cyclone Biparjoy, which made landfall over Kutch district last week as a ‘very severe cyclonic storm’. Thanks to the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD’s) accurate forecasts and the government response, only two casualties have been reported so far – versus the around-3,000 following a similar event at a similar location in June 1998. One reason there have been so few deaths this time is that the state government evacuated more than a lakh people from coastal areas, sparing them from being injured or killed by parts of their houses being blown in the wind or tossed in the water. That people were evacuated in time is a good thing but, the editorial asks, why do they have houses that can be so easily destroyed in the first place? The point is that disaster response has improved considerably, but it’s nowhere near where it actually needs to be: where the intensity at which a disaster happens following a natural event is much further along than it is today. Put another way, while the response to a disaster may never be perfect, there are ways to measure its success – and then when it is successful, we need to pay attention to how that success was defined.

When 3,000 people died, it was reasonable to ask why the IMD’s forecasts weren’t good enough and how the death toll could be lowered. When two people died, it became time to move past these measures and ask, for example, why so many people had to be evacuated and how many rupees in income they lost (that they won’t be able to recoup). This is less an attempt to downplay the significance of India’s achievement – it really is tremendous progress for 25 years – and more an acknowledgment of the nature of the beast: disasters are getting bigger, badder, and, importantly, pervasive in a way that they endanger more than lives. The living suffer, too. Storms render the seas choppy, destroy boats and fishing nets, deteriorate living conditions in less-than-pucca houses, eliminate livelihoods, and increase (informal) indebtedness. Evacuating a fisher’s family will improve its chance of living to tell the tale, but will that tale be anything other than one of greater destitution? It should be.

A related issue here is the subtle danger of using extreme measures: a focus on saving lives downplays and eventually sidelines the lack of protection for other aspects of living. They might be more recoverable, in a manner of speaking, but that doesn’t mean they will be recovered. And that’s what we need to focus on next, and next, and so forth, until our governments can guarantee the recoverability for everyone of, say, all the amenities assured by the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

The same goes for rain-battered cities. In the limited context of my locality, my problems are the sewage on the road, the threat of the sewage line mixing with the drinking-water line underground, the risk of a vehicular accident on my street, and power not being restored soon enough. Sure, there might be worse problems elsewhere, but these ones in particular seem to me to belong on the urban-dysfunction side of things. They make day-to-day life difficult, irritating, frustrating. They disrupt routines, increase the cognitive burden, and build stress. Over time, we have less happiness and higher healthcare expenses, both of which diverge unequally for more privileged versus less privileged people. The city as a whole could become more unequal in more ways, and the next time it rains, a new vicious cycle could be born. An agenda limited to saving lives will easily overlook this, as will an agenda that overlooks facets of life that aren’t problematic yet but could soon be.

Or maybe Chennai still has some way to go? The Tamil Nadu revenue and disaster-management minister Sattur Ramachandran just came on TV talking about how it’s notable that no lives were lost…

Jun 19, 2023
India – where repairing a bad road could make life worse

There is a long road that runs from Mantri Mall to Sankey Road, in Malleshwaram, Bengaluru, called Sampige Road. There are eighteen smaller roads that branch off from it on either side (straightforwardly numbered one through 18), and both the main stem and almost all of these side roads, or crosses, are full of shops selling everything from flowers to clothes, from SIM cards to electronic goods. Sampige Road is an excellent neighbourhood shopping destination. So it was true to experience when the city government decided to ruin it. (I live nearby and have firsthand details.)

The tree-lined line marked ‘Sampige Road’ runs from the bottom to the top of this Google Earth screenshot.

Some years ago, the then AIADMK government in power in Tamil Nadu, as well as in Chennai, wanted to revamp the city’s Pondy Bazaar area, a very popular shopping destination (with bigger stores than on Sampige Road and its Chennai counterpart, Ranganathan Street), under the Indian government’s mega-gentrification project, a.k.a. the ‘Smart Cities’ mission. The mayorate collected all the roadside hawkers and pushed them into a building in Pondy Bazaar, which defeated the point of why roadside hawking is successful (opportunistic buying) while the building also quickly turned squalid, and it repaved the sidewalks and widened the mainstem road.

On November 6, 2021, Chennai received 23 cm of rain; two days later, it received 21 cm more. These were both previously unreported quantities of rain in 24 hours in the city for many, many years, and thus it flooded almost everywhere. But one of the places that flooded first, the most and the longest? Pondy Bazaar. City officials had relaid the mainstem in the market not with asphalt but with concrete. Chennai has an average elevation of 16 m but the part of the district hosting the urban complex is almost entirely flat relative to the sea, which means water poured over the city isn’t eager to run into the Bay of Bengal. The concrete road and the repaved sidewalks in Pondy Bazaar exacerbated this problem: all the surfaces held the water there like a big bowl.

The roughly square shaped area cut by the diagonal mainstem in this Google Earth screenshot is Pondy Bazaar.

A similar fate awaits Sampige Road, which the local government plans to re-lay from 1st cross to nearly the 15th cross with concrete – including the sidewalks, which have until now been a medley of roadside vendors and pedestrians.

There are four more things that make matters much worse. The first two are unique to Sampige Road. First, it is sloped, climbing upward at about 30º from 1st cross onwards and plateauing around 16th cross. This means rain that falls over this stretch of the road will run off into the crossing roads or, more likely, pool into the four-way junction at the origin of Sampige Road – a point that is already notorious for awful traffic jams.

Second, Chennai has historically received more rain than Bengaluru but most of the former’s rainwater arrives in just two months (October and November) while the latter receives it more uniformly, from May to November. Put another way, Pondy Bazaar will be a watery hellscape for two months but Sampige Road, and/or its immediate neighbourhood, is at risk of being that way for more than half the year.

Third, ‘Smart Cities’ or not, concrete roads are a symbol of lazy governance. Their prime advantage is that they last for longer before requiring repairs. Asphalt roads are more easily damaged by rain because the water seeps into and destabilises the undersoil, which adversely affects the integrity of the asphalt. But on the flip side, asphalt roads can be patched, whereas concrete roads – which are often reinforced with embedded steel rods – need to be replaced block by giant block. Additionally, in Pondy Bazaar at least, the road is already bumpy and coarse. Concrete roads also reflect most of the incident light and heat (leading to glare and hot environs) and are more slippery when it rains.

The fourth problem is the most important. By opting for concrete roads over asphalt ones, both cities are solving for road repairs – the one consequence of heavy rain for which governments are most accountable. But in both cases, the governments are making problems worse for the people using these roads. Both a single, intense burst of rainfall as is typical in Chennai and a sustained campaign of showers as in Bangalore will lead to flooding. The only option for this water to drain will be stormwater drains.

In Pondy Bazaar, once the flood waters had drained, experts found that the area’s new stormwater drains, installed/refurbished at a cost of Rs 110 crore under the ‘Smart Cities’ mission, were insufficiently voluminous and, crucially, in almost a dozen areas, were located higher off the ground than where the water collected. This combination caused water to flow out of stormwater drains in the area, maintaining the mainstem in a constant state of floodedness. There is a related problem (the real fourth problem) that many news reports at the time didn’t address, and is likely to affect the new Sampige Road as much as it did Pondy Bazaar: garbage.

Stormwater drains around India’s cities are routinely choked with plastic trash quite simply because people litter where they feel like, with no regard for public or, for that matter, infrastructural hygiene. The drains around Pondy Bazaar were already poorly planned; they’re also highly likely to have been loaded with trash, leaving the rainwater with fewer opportunities to move away from the area.

Similarly, in the near future, the people of Sampige Road will enjoy easier walking, driving and shopping experiences for a little while longer than if the city had relaid the road with asphalt – but at one point, the area will confront the same state of dysfunction towards which the road is already barrelling today: stagnating water, traffic jams and unsafe conditions for pedestrians. The garbage problem is harder to solve because it’s not a technological problem but a social one: it’s more wicked, requires ‘soft’ solutions like raising awareness and changing people’s attitudes, needs carefully designed incentives that – among other things – will require people to repose more faith in the government, and will ultimately improve living conditions without translating into bursts of revenue from a contractor hired to build the road and later to undertake expensive repairs.

Concrete roads do have another advantage: manufacturing asphalt required for road-laying is more harmful to the climate than manufacturing concrete (although both materials are up there in terms of their carbon footprints), but I’m yet to read of city officials alluding to this benefit in their statements. I’m also curious about the respective carbon footprints for the entire lifecycle of both materials in use, especially considering asphalt can be made in smaller quantities and asphalt roads are amenable to being patched.

Perhaps more importantly, both Bengaluru and Chennai are endowed with well-funded, well-staffed research institutes (IISc and IIT Madras). Couldn’t city officials have commissioned them to develop road-laying materials that last longer, can be patched and are absorbent or porous? Such a material, together with changed social attitudes towards littering and a ban on cars on Sampige Road, will be the ideal solution.

Featured image credit: Credit: Liam Riby/Unsplash.

May 1, 2022
A Brahmin wedding

I was at a wedding this weekend. It had a distinct Omelas-like quality throughout. For most of the elders present, it was an oru naal koothu — a single-day celebration that has been many weeks in the making. But the bride, whom I knew, didn’t want to get married, especially to the groom her parents had picked out without her consent. I was told they had gone ahead anyway because the bride’s parents had liked the groom’s parents, and the two families had liked each other and wished to be related.

When the bride insisted, as best she could, that the wedding be postponed (or the groom be replaced — not a bad idea considering this was a man who believed sincerely that the women who spoke out in #MeToo were doing so only for attention), she was first met with a barrage of emotional blackmail: “think of what will happen to your mother”, “your grandmother will have a heart attack”, etc. — followed later by her father insisting that she provide a good enough reason, only to dismiss each one (‘don’t like the groom’, ‘don’t want to get married now’) promptly as not being “good enough”.

The wedding itself was a deeply patriarchal affair — an upper-caste conclave in which its members asserted their caste and “culture”, made a display of observing and preserving ancient traditions, brought two families together by unanimously waylaying the life of one woman. Like the story of the Mahabharata seems so different from that pieced together in Yuganta, viewing a Brahmin wedding through the eyes of an unwilling bride can reveal a very different picture from the wedding that everyone else experiences. It is no different from a tradition that her parents, the groom and his parents, and the extended family on both sides — enabled by a swarm of priests — further using the body and soul of one woman, with or without her willing participation. Good wedding ceremonies with willing participants exist, but only the bad ones truly demonstrate their totalitarian character.

For example, furthering the agony are the rituals immediately preceding the knot-tying, in which the bride and the groom are led through a series of joint activities by the priests and the extended family. They are apparently modelled on the rituals of two gods who got married: sitting on a swing together, exchanging garlands while perched on the shoulders of their fathers and brothers, and so forth. Surely these sound like the activities of a pair of people excited about getting married; to force them on a bride who has been brought there by (emotional and social) force has really no meaning, other than to reinforce the importance for all these rituals of a pliant woman, the ultimate vessel of Brahmin assertion.

The instrumentalisation of the bride and her functions begins in fact from the make-up — slathered on the bride, who also has to don silk sarees and other ornaments with no regard for the Chennai weather, while the groom stands next to her in a cotton shirt, a cotton veshti and the customary streak of vermillion on his forehead. She also has to sit through more rituals than him, some of which happen late at night or early in the day (she was woken up at 2 am for the make-up); cannot know when or what she can eat, or if she can visit the canteen or must have food brought to her; and, of course, she is expected to smile at all times for the cameras. While the matrimonial traditions of the families of the bride and the groom overlap for the most part, there are a few differences – yet all of them impose an equally unforgiving information asymmetry on the bride.

Meanwhile, the priests are chanting something in Sanskrit, a language no one in the room understands. It is hard to know what they are saying and why, but even as they are, there is another man with a bag full of cash standing just behind them, possibly belonging to the bride’s side, handing bills to them as part of rituals that require people to exchange wealth or give it away to others — i.e. to more relatives or to the priests themselves. There are some new observances as well, and while everyone is keen to observe them, no one asks the priests of their provenance or meaning. If they’ve been invented, it seems they will be observed — like the bride’s father having to carry a plateful of cash (intended to be donated to a temple) out of the room. They’re clearly nothing other than more lines drawn to distinguish between those whom the priests claim are “real Brahmins” and those who aren’t, and charging a fee to do so.

As the groom tied the three knots and everyone in the hall blessed them, and came away smiling, the wedding ended. Everyone was happy, nodding at each other in an implicit acknowledgment of having brought another conclave to a successful finish. The bride and groom were still onstage, next to a “holy fire”, spelling out the remainder of their prayers. The camera crew was taking a break, the relatives were heading in droves to the canteen, and the bride had to take a quick break in between as her new mother-in-law approached her with a make-up kit.

Featured image credit: Viktor Talashuk/Unsplash.

Mar 13, 2022
Groundwater extinction
In a report published on June 14, 2018, NITI Aayog, a policy think-tank established by the Government of India, claimed that 21 Indian cities would run out of their supply of groundwater by 2020. The report, especially this statistic, went on to be widely cited as a figure representing the water crisis currently facing the country (including multiple reports on The Wire). However, it appears now that this claim may not in fact be accurate.

Joanna Slater, the India bureau chief of The Washington Post, reported through a series of tweets on June 28 that NITI Aayog’s claim could be the result of a questionable extrapolation of district-level data provided by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), a body under the Union ministry of water resources. The claim in the report itself is attributed to the World Bank, the World Resources Institute (WRI), Hindustan Times and The Hindu.

However, according to Slater’s follow-ups, the WRI wasn’t the source of the claim, whereas other news reports had attributed it to the World Bank. When Slater reached out to the organisation, it denied knowledge the claim’s provenance. After she reached out to Niti Aayog, it pointed its finger at the CGWB, and which in turn denied having claimed that the 21 cities would not have access to groundwater after 2020.

The eventual source turned out to be a CGWB report published in June 2017, a year before Niti Aayog’s report was out, and with data updated until March 2013. It provided data showing that Indian cities (gauged at the district-level) are using their respective supply of groundwater faster than the resource is being replenished; the ongoing crisis in the city of Chennai is proof that this is true. But the report doesn’t account for groundwater replenishment efforts after 2013 as well as contributions from “sources like lakes and reservoirs” (to use Slater’s words).

Slater and others have said that faulty claims are not the way to illustrate this crisis, even if the crisis itself may be real. One unintended side-effect is that such reports might give the impression that we are in more trouble than we really are, which in turn could leave people feeling helpless, despondent and unwilling to act further.

Second, at a time when both the state and central governments are being forced to pay attention to water issues, making a problem seem worse than it actually is could support solutions we don’t need at the expense of addressing problems that we ignored.

For example, the BBC published a report in February last year stating that Bengaluru would soon run out of drinking and bathing water because the lakes surrounding the city weren’t clean enough. However, S. Vishwanath, a noted proponent of the sustainable use of water in the city, rebutted on Citizen Matters focusing on four reasons the BBC’s claim diverted attention from actual problems (quoting verbatim):
1. “Bengaluru never has depended on its lakes and tanks formally for its water supply since the commissioning of the Hesarghatta project in 1896
2. Even if we imagine the population of the Bengaluru metropolitan area to be 2.5 crores, rainwater itself [comes up to] 109 litres per head per day
3. Wastewater treatment and recycling is picking up, thanks to sustained pressure from civil society and courts
4. Most … doomsday predictions actually don’t take into account that the groundwater table is pretty high in the city centre … due to the availability of Cauvery water and leakages getting recharged in the ground”
In similar vein, the Tamil Nadu state government plans to set up two more desalination plants to quench Chennai’s thirst. Given that the real problem in Chennai is that the city destroyed the rivers it banked on and paved over natural groundwater recharge basins, water-related crises in the future become opportunities for the government to usher in ‘development’ projects without addressing the underlying causes.

The Wire
June 29, 2019
Jun 29, 2019
Happy new year!

2017 was a blast. Lots of things happened. The world became a shittier place in many ways and better in a few. Mostly, Earth just went around the Sun once more, and from what we know, it’s going to be doing that for a while. But here’s to a roaring 2018 anyway!

As of January 2018, this blog is nine years old. Thanks for staying with me on this (often meandering) journey, even when its name changed a billion times in the middle of 2017. The interest many of you have been nice enough to express vocally is what has kept me going. I published 113 blog posts this year, up a 100% from 2016. I also had 70 articles published in The Wire. I’m quite happy with that total of 183.

I think I will continue writing more on my blog than for The Wire through the first half of 2018 because editing freelancers’ submissions will continue to take up most of my time.

This is a consequence of two things I tried to do differently last year: publish more reported stories and get more writers. So given the limited monthly budget, and the fact that opinions are cheaper than reports, the published story count (390¹) was lower than that in 2016 – but the stories themselves were great, and we also got almost twice as many science writers to write them.

In 2018, I hope to expand the science journalism team at The Wire. We’ve also been planning a new-look section with a more diverse content offering. I’ll keep you all posted on how that goes. (If you wish to work with us, apply for a suitable position here.)

Personally, 2017 was full of ups and downs but since it ended mostly on the up, that’s how I’m going to remember the year. I did little to quell my anxieties and got back on antidepressants – but then I also moved to Chennai and started playing Dungeons & Dragons. Life’s good.

I’ll see you on the other side soon.

1. This excludes reports syndicated from publications The Wire has a content-sharing agreement with, republished content and agency copies.

Featured image credit: PublicDomainPictures/pixabay.

Jan 1, 2018
The marching coloumns

Every day is a swing between highs and lows, and in the last two months that I’ve experienced them, they’ve never been periodic. Setting off the work, the mood depends on the weather: cloudy is good, buoyant, rain is more than welcome, but a clear, blue sky and a blazing fireball in the empyrean is a dampener on my spirits, if not on anyone else’s. How will I work if I’m sweating all the time? Hmm.

The traffic in my erstwhile small city has grown to draconean proportions. Some argue that it’s a good sign, a sign of the city turning into a metropolis. I don’t like it. It not only places more minutes, more hours between work and home, home and work, between the factories and the beach, between the railway stations and the travel-shops, but it turns nice auto-drivers into pissed-off tyrants whom you simply don’t want to run into.

It takes nothing to precipitate all this but the clock striking 6. Areas and wards transform from familiar crenelations of microscopic economies, communities of traders, sweatshop toilers, and flower-braiders to hotbeds of rage, of exodus and maddened intra-urban migration… Suddenly, friends want to leave, fathers want to be left alone, mothers want to vent, and sisters want only to know what the hell’s going on.

If you’re in Chennai and traveling by auto in the evenings, I suggest you carry a book, or a Kindle, or a smartphone with which to kill time. It’s a time-warp, absolute and unrelenting chronostasis, with a profanity-drenched metronome ticking away like a time-bomb in the seat in front of yours. Of course, there are also people pushing, people shoving their way through the maze of vehicles. For every mile, I suppose it’s 10 points, and for every deceptively shallow pothole surmounted, 50.

In this crazy, demented rush, the only place anyone wants to be is on the other side of the road, the Place Where There Is Space, a vacuum on the far side that sucks the journeymen and journeywomen of Chennai into a few seconds of a non-Chennai space. When I ride in an auto on such days, I just don’t mind waiting, for everyone to pass by. I don’t want to make enemies of my fellows. At the same time, I never might know them better than their mumbled gratitude when I wave them ahead.

The driver gets pissed off, though. Starts to charge more, calls me “soft”, and that I don’t have what it takes to live and survive in the city. I tell him I can live and survive in the city alright, it’s just the city that’s not the city anymore. Sometimes, the driver laughs; most times, it’s a frown. In that instant, I’m computed to become an intellectual, and auto-drivers seem to think intellectuals have buttloads of money.

The only thing these days that intellectuals have buttloads of is tolerance.

Tolerance to let the world pass by without doing anything about it, tolerance to letting passersby jeer at you and making you feel guilty, tolerance to the rivers that must flow and the coloumns that must march, tolerance to peers and idols who insist something must be done, tolerance to their mundane introspection and insistence that there’s more to doing things than just hoping that that’s a purpose in itself.

It’s circular logic, unbreakable without a sudden and overwhelming injection of a dose of chaos. When the ants scurry, the mosquitoes take off, and the elephants stampede, all to wade through an influx of uncertainty and incomprehension and unadulterated freedom, real purpose will be forged. When children grow up, they are introduced to this cycle, cajoled into adopting it. Eventually, the children are killed to make way for adults.

With penises and vaginas, the adults must rule this world. But why must they rule? They don’t know. Why must they serve? They don’t know. Yeah, sitting in an auto moving at 1 mile an hour, these questions weigh you down like lodestones, like anchors tugging at the seafloor, fastening your wayward and seemingly productive mind to an epiphany. You must surely have watched Nolan’s Inception: doesn’t the paradox of pitch circularity come to mind?

The grass is always greener on the other side, the staircase forever leads to heaven, the triangle is an infinite mobius spiral, each twist a jump into the few-seconds-from-now future. Somewhere, however, there is a rupture. Somewhere inside my city, there is a road at the other end of which there is my city in chronostasis, stuck in a few-hours-from-now past.

Where auto-drivers aren’t pissed off because the clock struck 6, where fathers and mothers realize nothing’s slowed down but just that their clocks have been on fast-forward of late, where snaking ribbons of smoke don’t compete for space but simply let it go, no longer covet it, only join in the collective sorrow of our city’s adolescence.

Aug 18, 2012