Gurgaon’s Infrastructure Paradox: From Colonial Canals to Sewage Nallahs

A video still from Gurgaon in the monsoons of August 1977. The floods left half a million people homeless. Via British Pathe

I doom-scroll Instagram to laugh at all the ingenious memes that humor the Gurgaon floods, while Erica Gies's 'Water Always Wins' stares at me from my bookshelf, almost as if showing off the postulate reality of its title. Gurgaon fluctuates from being in a heat stressed state of acute water shortage to being ridiculed as a cheap Venice amidst massive urban flooding. Nearly 500 crores have been spent on upgrading the drainage and sewer infrastructure in the city to no fruit, while the escalating density of luxury real estate is increasing the pressure on dilapidating infrastructure. Even if the infrastructure were well-maintained and adequate, where would it take all the water run-off? The transboundary Najafgarh wetland and lake ecosystem, the overburdened sink for stormwater management in Delhi and Gurgaon, has become extremely inadequate to accommodate for all the anticipated rain in the region. The jhil of 220 sqkm has shrunk into a nallah of an appalling 7 sqkm, while a major part of the wetlands is engulfed by encroachments, untreated sewage, and the expanding urban enterprise. Seepage from Najafgarh now bears the risk of polluting the aquifers, let alone recharging them.

Long before being a concrete jungle, Gurgaon was a land of barsati nalas (hill torrents) that, as recorded by the Geological Survey of India, flowed “imperceptibly” draining water from the Eastward hills to river Yamuna. These flash floods were rather welcome as a replenisher of the district’s jhils and natural springs. These waters slowly meandered across the fields and sandy beds through a complex system of embankments, replenishing ground water level in their vicinity. The Sahibi naddi (river) was one such flash-flood stream known for “notoriously” changing its path and swelling up every monsoon before it poured out into the Najafgarh jhil in Delhi. Thomas Cowen, in his book Subaltern Frontiers, records the first disruption of this traditional system of dealing with water in the 1870s. Damming infrastructure and canals were built around Gurgaon to increase its capacity to yield cash crops. This, accompanied by the construction of ground water wells for irrigation, set the foundation for climatic devastation in Gurgaon. In the following 10-12 years, floods, droughts, and epidemics lead to the death of nearly a third of the region’s cattle, rendered nearly 4 lakh acres of cultivable land as wasteland, and initiated a widespread famine causing human loss. The reason tickles common sense. Groundwater was extracted mindlessly while its seasonal replenishment was blocked by keeping the floods out.

We have spent 150 years and many crores to maintain this pattern. Our laws regulate ground water and surface water separately, reinforcing a fracture in their governance. It obviously affects urban and territorial planning models where authorities responsible for drinking water, sewage, rainwater management, and land-use are not obliged to coordinate. A comically exemplar outcome is the loss of one fourth of the stretch of river Sahibi, either to sewage drains, over-extraction of replenishing aquifers, or more carelessly to the transfer of riverbed to private land ownership. A feeble intention to revive the river surfaces seasonally like the floods. While it might be a step in the right direction, the plans reflect a lack of an achievable strategy. Gimmickry like renaming the Najafgarh drain to river Sahibi is devoid of any actionable plan to enliven the river.

This is a grim systemic chaos that exposes the broken linkages; not just of our drains, but also between hydrological and administrative territories, ground water and surface water management, green tribunals and urban development authorities and most of all cookie cutter aspirations and hyperlocal contingencies. These fractures portray the absence of innovation in our urbanism practices and over-reliance on colonial technocratic models that fundamentally aim to control water, conquer it and win over it. However, as time has reminded water always wins. This begs for a radical realignment of our built environment with the land and water ecospheres that hold Gurgaon as a megalomaniac urban mission. We might have to begin by falling in sync with the water cycle diagram from a 6^th standard EVS textbook.

Nearly 80% of the annual rainfall and flash flood received by Gurgaon in a span of 3 months (as per CGWB) must be kept local for usage when there is a shortage of water. What would it entail if this becomes the primary vision while designing and planning for the city? Can this vision be encoded in our legal structures and be mandated socially and politically? How would different professionals respond to it? Architects could start rethinking our frictionless drains as bio-swales that take water through the city rather slowly. At parks, grass might have to grow taller and sometimes be replaced by bushes to accommodate more water. At the scale of buildings, coarser materials might have to replace frictionless glass and smooth concrete so that the pressure on infrastructure is delayed. Would adoption of these strategies be awarded by certification systems, just like how energy efficiency is rewarded? Innovation always operates in a domino effect; what kind of inventions would this spark? Would someone be able to hybridize the traditional embankments and jhil ecosystem with the road networks of the city? Would the transport industry then incentivize (and normalize) research on floating cars? My brain explodes with possibilities.

In 1920, British officer F.L. Brayne, led the ‘Gurgaon Experiment’ that completely transformed the life and face of the district. Brayne conducted a massive campaign, grassroots outreach, and robust cross-sectoral coordination between departments of health, agriculture, education, and social reform for the sake of converting villages into their sanitized versions that brought them closer to the ‘superior’ British lifestyle. While we must be critical of the white savior complex that underscored this experiment, it reminds us of the possibility of a systemic change that completely disrupts existing systems. Now more than ever, the city needs a Gurgaon Experiment 2.0, one that questions the borrowed western orthodox ideas of how our cities must be built, designed, and governed. One that is historically aware yet forges imagination almost as if it’s science fiction.