Cities Underwater – How Infrastructure Failures Swamp Pune and Mumbai

by Akash Pharande, Managing Director – Pharande Spaces

The real estate industry in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, its twin city, has been booming in recent years, making them two of the fastest-growing cities in India. In just five years, the number of new homes sold in Pune went from 60,000 in 2019 to 90,000 in 2024 – a huge 50% rise. This growth has obviously worked well for the local economy, but it has also revealed major flaws in the city’s infrastructure.

Such flaws are producing chaos that can potentially wreck a city’s future. Pune is not the only case in point – Mumbai is perhaps an even more appropriate example, as is seen in the current flooding situation which has once again brought the financial capital to its knees.

The Mithi River flood management plan is inordinately delayed. Aspects like interceptor drains, pumping stations and floodgates are pending, with no clear resolution point in sight. Mumbai’s ancient stormwater drainage system is being improved, but it is woefully unequal to the onslaught of the annual rain onslaught which literally puts low-lying districts underwater.

In Pune, major delays in separating stormwater and sewage drains and slow progress on flood protection walls along Ambil Odha stream and other city nallas have left vulnerable areas prone to flooding. The postponement of key culvert construction in Hinjewadi IT Park has resulted in frequent waterlogging and disruption despite below-average rainfall.

From Urban Boom to Infrastructure Crisis

However city planning authorities view the current problems that these two cities face, their solutions have not kept up with the fast pace of real estate development. It is, more or less, the same story across all Indian metros – roads, water supply, sewage, and waste management facilities are all falling behind rampant construction. The impact is worst on the new suburban and peripheral areas that have just been consolidated into the city limits.

The results:

• Traffic jams and perennially crowded roads
• Water shortages and electric grid failures
• Unreliable waste management, leading to excessive reliance on landfills and degrading some areas, which have become veritable dumping grounds for the whole city
• Urban flooding due to poor drainage

These problems not only make life harder for residents but also hurt the city’s economy. Much of the current problems can be attributed to delays in infrastructure rollouts, sometimes because of overlapping jurisdictions, at other times due to complex approval processes, and usually also because of insufficient enforcement of existing measures.

Many important infrastructure projects have been inordinately delayed across our top cities. There are many such examples in Pune and PCMC. The extremely important Kharadi-Keshavnagar bridge, which would instantly decongest the Pune-Solapur highway, has been bogged down by bureaucratic red tape and land acquisition issues for more than a decade. Pune Metro Phase 2, specifically the Swargate-Katraj route and the Hinjewadi-Shivajinagar line, are also delayed. Stormwater drainage upgrades and road widening in many peripheral areas are way overdue.

Where is the real problem? The authorities sometimes claim it is because of lack of funds, and at other times troubles with land acquisition. Often, the real reason is just clashing agendas of opposing politicians. The problems that people who live in the affected areas face are secondary concerns, if they are concerns at all beyond seasonal vote bank politics.

If action isn’t taken right now, Pune could go down the same path of unsustainable urbanization as Mumbai, an many other Indian cities.

A Quick and Coordinated Response

The focus needs to change from planning to execution on a war footing:

• State agencies like PMRDA, PCMC, and PMC must begin to work together, and more closely
• The focus needs to be on building more roads, enhancing public transportation, clearing and widening storm drains, ensuring adequate water supply across all parts of the city, and completely upgrading sanitation facilities.
• Capital must be made available for infrastructure investments, for which public-private partnerships (PPPs) and municipal bonds can be used
• Regulatory approvals for must be digitized
• To prevent the environment from collapsing altogether, more green areas must be created as urban ‘lung space’, and water bodies must be protected.

The Heavy Cost of Delayed Action

Delays in creating adequate infrastructure and remedying systems that have failed to work result in steadily worsening urban pollution and flooding, and increasing strain on public services all around. The costs of commuting rise inexorably as citizens must take long, congested detours to reach work and back home, and the environment gets degraded with every passing year. Business productivity declines, and the entire city’s economy goes into a tailspin.

Citizens will have increasingly unequal access to clean drinking water and sanitation, and handicapped transportation of people and goods makes everything more expensive and harms the environment with every minute spent in a traffic jam.

The current situation with flooding in both Pune and Mumbai should be a call to action, but because these are regular occurrences every year, we accept them as inevitable now take them in our stride. This acceptance of the unacceptable is, perhaps, the greatest misfortune of all.