Publish every city's drain map and desilting status before the monsoon, not after the flood

India

Every year the same cities go under, on roughly the same dates, at roughly the same junctions. Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Gurugram and Guwahati now flood as an annual event rather than an emergency. The rain is not the surprise. The surprise is that the response restarts from zero every June.

The plans exist. That is what makes this a governance problem.

India's urban flood framework is robust on paper — national guidelines, city disaster plans, drainage master plans. Cities still drown. The gap is at the last mile: funding that arrives late, authority split between a municipal body, a development authority and a state department, and no single name attached to a stretch of drain.

The physical causes are equally well documented and equally unaddressed: storm-water drains sized for rainfall intensities that no longer occur, wetlands and lakes built over, and enough concrete that water which used to soak away now has to be carried somewhere by a system that cannot carry it.

Desilting is the clearest example of the problem

Every city desilts before the monsoon. Every city announces a completion percentage. Almost none publish which drains, how much silt, verified by whom. A number with no map behind it cannot be checked by the people who live on the street that floods — and they are the only inspectors who are there every day.

What we are asking for

  1. Publish the storm-water drain network as a public map, with each stretch's owning agency named. A citizen should be able to look up which body is responsible for the drain outside their gate without filing an RTI.
  2. Publish desilting completion per stretch before 1 June, with quantity removed and the officer who certified it — not a citywide percentage.
  3. Name an accountable officer for each known flooding hotspot. Cities already hold these lists internally; publishing them converts an internal note into a commitment.
  4. Publish the status of every lake and wetland in the municipal limits: encroachment recorded, action taken, area lost. These are the city's actual flood defences and they are being deleted quietly.
  5. Restate drainage design standards against current rainfall data, and publish which stretches now fall short — so the gap is a costed number rather than an annual surprise.
  6. Publish a post-monsoon audit by 31 October: where it flooded, how long water stood, what failed, what will change before next June.

Why this is worth asking even though it sounds boring

Nothing here needs new law or new money. It asks for maps and dates that already exist inside municipal offices to be visible to the people standing in the water. A flood hotspot with a published owner and a published desilting date is a very different thing from one without.

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