Every monsoon, Chennai has the same conversation: Will the rains be good this year? Will the reservoirs fill? Which roads will flood? Which neighbourhoods will be cut off?
We have become remarkably good at discussing the rain. Perhaps we should spend a little more time discussing the city. Because Chennai’s problem is not simply that too much rain falls in a short period. It is that a rapidly expanding metropolis has progressively reduced the places where that water can pause, spread, seep, drain and finally reach the sea.
I have seen it first hand during the last Cyclone Michaung when the roads and campus were inundated and life remained dislocated.
The city beneath the city
There was another Madras beneath the one we know today.
It was a city of eris, tanks, ponds, marshes, wells, canals, surplus channels and backwaters. Water moved through this landscape slowly. Tank cascades stored monsoon flows; excess moved downstream; wetlands absorbed what could not be held; canals and creeks eventually carried the surplus towards the coast. The old system was neither perfect nor primitive. It was simply adapted to the terrain. Madras Musings has described this forgotten landscape in considerable detail in its past publications – how a network in which the eri-s were linked, bunds and sluices were maintained and water was treated as a community responsibility.
That is the part worth remembering. Not because Chennai can return to an eighteenth century water system. It cannot. But because the underlying principle remains valid: “Know where the water comes from, where it gathers, where it must go and never obstruct those routes without understanding the consequences.”
Water does not recognise our boundaries
The modern city is divided into wards, zones, municipalities, departments and development authorities. Rainwater ignores all of them. It follows the slope of the land. This is why Chennai needs to think much more seriously in terms of drainage basins and catchments, rather than treating flooding as an isolated problem on a particular road or in a particular ward.
A building approved in one location can alter the flow of water somewhere else. A filled pond may not immediately create a problem. A blocked channel may remain invisible for years. Then comes an intense spell of rain and suddenly the accumulated consequences appear together.
The water has not changed its mind. The city has changed its landscape.
Pallikaranai is not empty land
Nowhere is this more evident than Pallikaranai. For years, the marsh was treated as though it were an inconvenient gap between areas of development. But the older water map tells another story. Pallikaranai was part of a much larger southern drainage system, receiving water from upstream lakes and tanks before the flow moved towards Okkiyam Maduvu and the backwaters.
An earlier article in Madras Musings has itself described Pallikaranai as a vital wetland ecosystem and a natural buffer against flooding. That observation is pertinent – A wetland is not “vacant land”. A floodplain is not “unused land”. A drainage channel is not an encumbrance waiting to be removed. They are components of the city’s infrastructure. We understand the value of a flyover or a Metro line but find it harder to understand the value of land that prevents water from entering our homes!
Chennai has changed. The rainfall risk has changed too
The Chennai of today is not the Chennai of our grandparents. The metropolitan footprint has expanded enormously. Roads, apartment complexes, commercial buildings, parking areas, technology campuses and other infrastructure have replaced large areas of permeable ground. At the same time, climate change is making extreme rainfall, heat and other urban risks more difficult to predict and manage. This does not mean every flood is caused by climate change. That would be an easy but misleading explanation. It means something more practical – we can no longer plan the city using yesterday’s assumptions about tomorrow’s weather. The margin for error is shrinking.
The GCC question is really a planning question
Chennai should welcome its Global Capability Centres, technology companies and new economic activity. They bring jobs, investment and talent. They are part of the city’s future. But economic growth cannot be considered independently of the infrastructure that supports it. When employment clusters grow, housing follows. Roads expand. Traffic increases. Water consumption rises. More land gets paved. More sewage and stormwater have to be handled.
So, the question for planners is not whether a particular GCC, office complex or residential development is desirable. The question is cumulative: Can the drainage basin absorb the development being permitted within it? That question should be answered before the building rises, not after the neighbourhood floods!
Time for development red lines
Chennai now needs some firm red lines.
Critical wetlands, flood-storage areas, natural drainage channels, watercourses and identified flow paths must be protected as infrastructure assets. Where development is allowed, the developer should demonstrate its impact on the entire catchment, not merely the individual plot. This is where planning needs to become more sophisticated. A project-by-project approach can miss the bigger picture. Ten individually “compliant” projects can collectively overwhelm a basin.
The city therefore needs a “cumulative drainage-impact test” for major developments. The principle has to be simple – if a development adds to the public drainage burden, it must contribute to solving that burden.
Regulation without penalties is only a suggestion
There is little value in identifying water channels on paper if they can subsequently be encroached upon, filled or narrowed. Nor is a small penalty a deterrent where the commercial value of the land is enormous. Illegal construction over watercourses, filling of waterbodies and obstruction of natural drainage should attract penalties proportionate to the economic gain from the violation. Restoration should be part of the remedy wherever feasible.
There must also be accountability within the approval system. Otherwise, the cycle remains familiar – permit, build, flood, inspect, announce corrective measures and wait for the next monsoon.
Chennai deserves better than that.
Government cannot do this alone
The Greater Chennai Corporation has an important responsibility. So does the State Government. So do the planning and water-management agencies. But this cannot remain a government-only exercise.
Political parties must resist the temptation to treat every flood as an opportunity for blame and every drainage project as a five-year achievement.
Developers must recognise that the city is not an unlimited development canvas.
And citizens have responsibilities too.
We cannot demand every vacant patch be paved, every road widened and every waterbody beautified into something that no longer holds water and then ask why the neighbourhood floods.
Residents’ associations and ‘area sabhas’ could play a much larger role in monitoring local waterbodies, drains and known flood points. The public should be able to see the drainage map of its own neighbourhood.
Citizens should know which basin they live in. That sounds technical. It is not. It is basic civic literacy.
Chennai needs a water map
Perhaps the most useful thing Chennai could do now is to create a publicly accessible ‘Metropolitan Water and Drainage Atlas’. It should show the city’s drainage basins, lakes, tanks, wetlands, old watercourses, surplus channels, flood-prone areas, culverts, stormwater networks and critical discharge routes. Old survey maps should be studied alongside current satellite imagery and ground-level data.
The earlier Madras Musings research makes the point beautifully – traces of the old system still survive in tanks, marshes and the faint lines of former water routes. We do not have to recreate old Madras. But we should know what stood there before we build the next Chennai.
Make flood resilience a citizens’ movement
Chennai should move from ‘monsoon management’ to ‘monsoon governance’.
That means protecting natural storage, strengthening engineered drainage, maintaining what already exists, regulating what is built and making the consequences of poor development decisions visible. It also means looking beyond one monsoon and one administration.
A metropolitan resilience plan should have a long horizon and political continuity. Governments will change. Chennai’s geography will not. The city should set measurable targets for protecting wetlands, restoring water channels, improving drainage capacity and reducing development pressure on flood-sensitive land. And citizens should be able to hold institutions accountable against those targets.
Save Madras
There is something almost ironic about all this.
We call Chennai a modern megapolis. We speak proudly of its IT corridors, manufacturing base, ports, universities, hospitals and global businesses. Yet the city beneath all this modernity still follows an older rule: Water must have somewhere to go!
Earlier Madras Musings articles had described the old water system as a form of “practical memory” – a reminder of how water once came, stayed and left without turning the town against itself. That is precisely the memory Chennai needs now. Not nostalgia.
The red lines have to be clear. Protect the wetland. Protect the watercourse. Respect the drainage basin. Make development carry its infrastructure cost. Penalise violations meaningfully. Publish the data. And involve citizens before, not after, the flood.
The rain will come. We cannot negotiate with it. But we can decide what kind of city receives it.
Madras once knew how to live with water. Chennai must learn it again before the next monsoon teaches the lesson the harder way.
— by Colonel M V Shashidhar, Retd.