CATASTROPHIC FLOODS IN MAHARASHTRA

Mumbai Falls Victim To Disastrous Ruling Class Policies As Well

Ashok Dhawale

THE unprecedented cloudburst and torrential floods that hit Maharashtra and its capital city Mumbai from July 26, 2005 onwards for nearly ten days have had truly catastrophic consequences that have not been witnessed in the state for the past century.  The 944 mm of rain that was recorded in the suburbs of Mumbai in the 24 hours of July 26-27 was the eighth highest recorded in the country during the last 150 years, and it was the highest recorded in any major city in India during this period.

COLOSSAL DEVASTATION

The floods have led to colossal devastation. Well over 1000 people have lost their lives, half of them in Mumbai city alone, and most of the rest in the adjoining Thane, Raigad and Ratnagiri districts in the Konkan region. However, loss of life has also occurred in far-off districts like Nanded and Parbhani in the Marathwada region and in Yavatmal, Amravati and Washim in the Vidarbha region.

Television screens across the country have flashed images of literally lakhs of men, women and children of Mumbai and Thane districts wading for hours through 20-25 kilometres of waist-deep and even chest-deep water to reach their homes in a half-dead state. Many of them were swept away and died, and many more were killed when huge boulders crashed on their hutments and villages.

There has also been tremendous loss of animal life in several parts of the state, with over 1500 buffaloes and thousands of sheep dying in the floods in Mumbai and Thane districts alone.

With torrential rains continuing almost all over the state, the gates of several of the large and medium dams had to be opened as a safety measure, and this put several cities and hundreds of villages under water, especially in districts of Western Maharashtra like Satara, Sangli, Kolhapur, Solapur and Pune. Here, however, people from the affected areas were evacuated, largely preventing loss of life. 

The loss to property has been massive, with initial estimates placing it at well over Rs 10,000 crore. Thousands of hutments of the urban and rural poor have been swept away along with all their meagre belongings. The ground floor flats in thousands of middle class buildings in cities and towns were inundated for two to three days at a stretch, destroying everything that was inside. The same was the case with thousands of shops and commercial establishments.

Electricity, water, telephone and cellphone connections were cut off for days together. Rail and road transport ground to a halt. Railway tracks and rakes were destroyed and mail/express trains to and from Mumbai remained closed for nearly two weeks. Even air travel was adversely affected.

But by far the biggest destruction has been in agriculture. Crops have been destroyed in tens of thousands of hectares of land spread over more than 20 of the 35 districts in the state.  In fact, the rainfall in 29 of these districts upto August 10 has already exceeded the average rainfall for the whole season ending September 30. In some of these districts, it is two or even three times the normal average. As a result, entire fields have been washed away leading to massive soil erosion. Cattle have also been destroyed. This has severely hit both the peasantry as well as agricultural workers, who find themselves without employment.

CALLOUS ADMINISTRATION

The most glaring feature of this tragedy has been the complete failure of both the Congress-NCP-led state government and the Shiv Sena-BJP-led Mumbai municipal corporation as well as other local bodies in dealing with the crisis that shattered and dislocated the lives of millions. For the first three days, it was virtually as if no state administration was in existence at all.

After a similar, although not so severe, flood situation in Mumbai in 1997, the Shiv Sena-BJP regime had with much fanfare unveiled a so-called Disaster Management Plan under guidance from the World Bank. After another such flood that rocked the metropolis in 2001, the Congress-NCP regime made tall promises to update this Plan. Nothing of the sort ever happened. The state government and the municipal corporation, both political leadership and bureaucracy, and the police machinery were all paralysed. This has led to intense anger amongst the people all over the state. The print and electronic media have also taken them to task in an extremely critical manner.

Actually, what the entire bourgeois political leadership – the SS-BJP and the INC-NCP – was immersed in during the weeks before the flood crisis began was the high drama of the defection of former chief minister Narayan Rane from the Shiv Sena and the suspense about which party he would eventually join – the Congress or the NCP! He eventually chose the former, and while the people of the state were reeling under massive floods, the government still found the time to swear him in as the new state revenue minister!

Yet another target of the people’s ire has been the Reliance Energy Company, which provides electricity to several suburbs of Mumbai. More than a week after July 26, Reliance still could not restart the power to thousands of homes and commercial establishments, and the state government had to finally issue it a strict warning and notice. In contrast, the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) (which was finally trifurcated by the state government in June) could restore power to the vast areas under its charge within two to three days. So much for all the glorification of the privatisation of the power sector!

It was after the visit of prime minister Manmohan Singh to the state and his announcement of a relief package that the state government machinery slowly began to move. The central government has upto now sanctioned Rs 1000 crore as relief to the state, which is still extremely paltry considering the massive scale of the devastation. Now Rs 1 lakh has been announced to be given to the next of kin of those deceased, Rs 1000 per head (with a maximum of Rs 5000 per family) and 10 kg of rice, 10 kg of wheat and 10 litres of kerosene has been announced to the flood-affected. While the distribution has begun, it is invariably accompanied by complaints of corruption and mismanagement. 

DISASTROUS POLICIES

The flood situation, especially in Mumbai, was greatly aggravated as a result of the whole thrust of disastrous development policies that have been pursued by successive Congress, Shiv Sena-BJP and Congress-NCP state governments over the last three decades, more so during the last one and a half decades of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. The pet ruling class slogan at the begining of the LPG era was to turn Mumbai into a Singapore or a Hongkong. It has now been slyly modified to turning Mumbai into a Shanghai!

The stark truth of the matter is that the financial capital of India has long been controlled by a thoroughly corrupt and venal nexus comprising bourgeois politicians, servile bureaucrats, monopoly capitalists, rapacious builders and a criminal mafia. The sixth player that has emerged in a big way to complete the hexagon is foreign finance capital in the form of multinationals and the World Bank. The entire development of Mumbai is being planned and executed so as to serve these very interests, at the cost of the working people and the common man.

Without going into all the lurid details of this aspect, which merits a separate study by itself, we shall merely limit ourselves in this piece to show how this kind of skewed development of the metropolis has made the city itself unsustainable at times of crisis of the type that it has just gone through. It is a positive development that, under the shocking impact of the recent floods and the grave probability of their re-occurrence in the future, this issue is now being debated even by sections of the mainstream media, who had all along conspired to brush it under the carpet.

One of the vital reasons why the floods affected Mumbai this time in such a terrible manner was that there was no mechanism for the flood waters to flow off to the sea. The traditional rivers that not so long ago used to course through Mumbai – the Mithi river and the Dahisar river – had become clogged up over the years due to the rapacious course of development pursued by the ruling classes. The huge mangrove patches that used to drain water during the monsoons had also been massively encroached upon by the builder lobby which was hand in glove with the powers that be. The Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) rules had been flagrantly flouted by the same vested interests out to make a fast buck.

Take the case of the Mithi river. The huge Bandra-Kurla complex sponsored by the state government itself encroached upon the river. All along the course of this vital 15 km long waterway, hundreds of polluting industries were set up. The runways of the Mumbai airport itself were built in such a way to force the river to change course. Several constructions came up to block the path of the river. And now finally, the beginning of the construction of the highly elitist proposed Bandra-Worli Link Flyover almost closed up the mouth of the Mithi river where it enters the sea at Bandra. It was therefore hardly surprising that the areas around the Mithi river saw the worst water-logging during the recent floods.

Or take the systematic destruction of the mangroves. The Esselworld Park at Gorai, an illegal golf course at Goregaon, the Bandra-Kurla complex itself, and several other encroachments took place on the mangroves at Andheri, Versova, Oshiwara, Malad, Borivli, Mahul, Madh island, Mankhurd and other areas. This blatant violation of nature was sure to extract its price. The ancient and dilapidated drainage system of Mumbai has never been overhauled for decades, and this again aggravated the situation. The rapidly growing concretisation of the city has also had a very serious impact.

The huge skyscrapers being built in Mumbai with every passing year with no thought to the strain on civic amenities, the massive proliferation of private cars over the years, the deliberate dereservation of gardens, parks and open spaces in the city to oblige the builder lobby, the permission given to the big textile magnates to sell off their mill lands at exorbitant prices while leaving the workers in the lurch are only a few more examples of the direction of development of the city under the control of this unholy nexus.

DISCREDITED BOGEY

And now, taking advantage of the floods, an old and discredited bogey is being resurrected by the mainstream media and by the ruling classes that they serve. That is the renewed proposal to separate Mumbai from Maharashtra and make it into either a separate state or a union territory. This was precisely the conspiracy that was decisively struck down by the people of Maharashtra during the historic Samyukta Maharashtra movement, led by the Left parties. For this, the people paid the heavy price of 105 martyrs killed in brutal police firing in Mumbai in the 1950s. It was this firing that led to the renaming of Flora Fountain in the heart of South Mumbai as Hutatma Chowk. 

Conveniently forgetting all this historical legacy, one leading English daily actually had the temerity to conduct a so-called opinion poll of just 300 people and ask the question whether they wanted Mumbai not only to be a separate state, but also a separate country! Another leading English daily has begun championing the cause of having a separate CEO for Mumbai! Fali Nariman, a nominated MP to the Rajya Sabha, advocated making Mumbai a separate state in his speech before parliament, and the cue was promptly taken up by other elitist individuals who represent no one but themselves! The proposal was, of course, decisively rejected by all major political parties in parliament.

 (Next Week: CPI(M) Plunges Into Relief Work)