The dry river sutra: a requiem
Saurabh Popli
Bhopal, India
When was the last time you saw fireflies? If, like me, you have spent the last few years in a city, the chances are that it was a long time ago. Fireflies, once a common childhood experience, have silently disappeared from our consciousness. This year, despite the abundant and prolonged rains (in 2022, it rained twice the annual average in Bhopal), I barely saw half a dozen frogs and toads. I know, I often get an incredulous look for that observation.
Located approximately at the geographic centre of India, Bhopal is remarkable for its natural beauty; it is set on a plateau in a mosaic of forests, fields, and lakes, and surrounded by low hills. The 17th largest Indian city, with a population of approximately 2.2 million, it has grown nearly six times in the last 30 years and now covers a vast erstwhile hinterland; one sees a banal sameness of featureless buildings, and a wholly unremarkable experience.
Aerocity, Bhopal Development Authority
Out in the early morning, on the outskirts of the city the air is brisk and fresh. The road I’m walking on leads me beyond the clutch of buildings and the colony I live in, out into an open landscape, and soon I can see enormous trees that dot the lightly rolling agricultural landscape against a distant horizon of low hills. Returning to this familiar, bucolic scene after a few years, I cannot help but notice that the grid-iron of freshly laid tar roads several feet above the thorny bush, buries the last vestige of what was there before. The lay of the land is irreparably altered and soon the earth will be filled over and raised for buildings that will crowd the neighbourhood.
When I first moved here 10 years ago, it was the trees that told me the phenomenal age of this land. Much later, I found that an archaeological dig had unearthed a stone industry from the Paleolithic Age – discovered not far from where I walked. Then, one could see wild mango trees every few kilometers – likely 200 years old. Arresting in presence, each easily 80 feet high, with a canopy that shades a half-acre field each, living in the deep time of trees. Set in a small group in an Amrai and recognizable from a long way away, they act as waypoints on the landscape and tell the story of the deep and fertile plain upon which they grew. The Mahua are older still.
Not just us
Out to one side I see a father-son duo, minding a flock of sheep. Wearing the customary angarakha and scarlet turbans; they are Raika, a community of grazers that migrate each year to our parts from Chittorgarh, a distance of more than 500 kilometers. Tall and wiry, their slight form belies the enormous strength and endurance, but encamped in a maze of tar roads their camels seem curiously out of place and vulnerable.
The tamarind tree of Belaire
An old tamarind tree stands as a silent witness below a glowing neon sign atop a high rise apartment building that announces your arrival at “Belaire”. With passing years, as the city encroached upon them with roads and walls, a deep flush of new leaves has appeared early, and this signals a change. The trees are dying and will not be here long now.
I am struck by the realization that without the familiar markers, few places are as before. Indeed, in most of our cities, places have changed beyond description. Often, evocative names like Pipaliya, Imaliya, or Badhjhiri are the only relics of the past – a rupture as desolate and severe as it is incomprehensible. Frenetic urbanization, pithily termed “colonization”, has obliterated every last vestige of memory of the native landscape within the city.
Time and the river
This year saw an active monsoon and the air was cool and heavy. It rained through like each year before, and when roads caved in at familiar stretches, social media was agog with innuendo and imputations. No one questioned the design of the city at all.
The city, natural rhythms, and urban risk
Bhopal flooded twice during last year’s monsoon, and the waters have caused extensive damage. It isn’t unfamiliar. In 2016, and again in 2019, the scene was similar with a few variations of detail. In many ways, this is a familiar story from all over the country. Between July 8th and 9th 2016, Bhopal recorded 175 millimetres of rain, with 111 millimetres falling in just six hours. Low-lying areas had flooded, the water rose by nearly two metres in several localities. Five hundred houses were severely damaged, with news of five deaths. The vast Upper Lake, 30 square kilometres, recorded an unprecedented and alarming rise of 2.8 metres. Traffic and essential services in several parts of the city were severely affected as the risk of disease and economic losses mounted and were uncountable. Over the next two days, several TV news channels devoted extensive coverage of the loss of life and property. Months later, the storm and its consequences receded from public memory. The issues of risk, vulnerability and economic loss, as well as danger to human life, were then too, ascribed to a singular weather phenomenon and forgotten. The impacts of this extreme weather event could have been foretold. Studies noting the substantial changes to the city’s structure had shown that the tree cover had dropped by 90% over four decades, accompanying similar figures for the loss of land under cultivation as also habitat for its non-human populations. Again no one questioned the way the city is planned. Or its priorities.
Urban flooding
Many factors converge to cause flooding in Indian cities. Some of these, like the seasonal precipitation cannot be helped, but a majority of these factors are human-made causes, including the design of stormwater management systems based on poor or outdated technical understanding. Though these factors are well-recognized within the scientific literature, there have been few, if any, examples of city design that have been sensitive to the needs of Indian cities in general, and for this the blame must rest squarely on the institutions and protocols that govern the design and execution of public works.
Recent research reveals that a number of factors affect and will increasingly determine the storm events intensity and duration over subcontinental cities. Factors like the presence of aerosols over cities – dust, soot from automobile smoke – and pollutants like nitrous oxide greatly increase the likelihood of intense rainfall events over the area. These factors are likely to be aggravated in the regime of climate collapse due to global warming which makes rainfall patterns increasingly variable, and storms of increasing intensity are already visible in the different geographies of the subcontinent.
The extensive areas of the city under hard paving – roads, buildings, parking – coupled with the destruction of wetlands and absence of vegetation mark a corresponding decrease in the ability of the receiving surfaces to absorb or hold that water. The fact that this water is being discharged almost as soon as it is received on the surface means that within a matter of minutes, the water is moving at a speed towards drains and downslope. Floods are not a consequence of the amount of water that moves down a system, as much as they are a consequence of the rate at which this water is discharged from the system, and the crossing of the threshold that marks its inability to cope with that volume over that time. As such, this indicates that those systems that can extend the capacity of the system, modify the speed of discharge, or reduce it, ought to be prioritized over those that have been found to be flood-prone, or worse, those systems that have exacerbated the risk of flooding.
Urban drainage systems, their science and political economy
The design of the urban drainage systems we use was invented in Europe for a climate, time, urban density, and pattern of urbanization that was very different from the Indian case. It is based on the assumption, model and protocol that are about a century past their use-by date, and no longer serves our cities well. This itself should cause us to reflect and consider alternatives, but institutions of planning and public works have remained insular and out of touch with the everyday reality of common Indians – this is well-documented and widely known.
Mis-cognition
If you were to ask the residents about the city, they would tell you its many delights, but the chances are that no one would mention a river. Or rivers. Or streams that dissect the landscape and give it its character and life. Bhopal has a sub-humid composite climate, with mild winters, and lies on an elevation with low-to-moderate topographic variation. The soil and soil depth varies, and while the underlying Vindhyan sandstone does not make good aquifers, it is overlain with basalts formed by the lava flows of Jurassic provenance, that decompose into vesicular structure that yields some groundwater. It is not much, but has sustained the city and the agriculture of the region for the past few decades, increasingly since the arrival of deep-well boring technology and diesel and electric pumps. This and the provision of piped water from distant reservoirs has put the shade over the region’s many streams and rivers, which are now seen as drains and nullahs carrying sewage and other waste water.
And yet, the region abounds with streams and rivers, each sustaining life in all its diversity and vividness. It is these rivers that once formed the lifeline of the region, carving paths around crustal crenellation of the surface and transforming the dry, brown landscape into vivid verdure. Wherever these streams flow, they support a host of creatures of every known type and taxa, from the tiniest to the most formidable predators on Earth. Recent research reveals that the rivers of the region are more, not less, biodiverse than those of many other regions in India. They play a major role in mitigating drought, reduce the likelihood of flooding, improve the soil, water and air quality perceptibly, and are important sources of recreation and enjoyment.
Why have the rivers of the city received less attention?
Urban rivers
What is our notion of a river? What qualifies, or does not? Problems of cities like flooding can ultimately be traced to the mis-perception of the river and its role in urban life and the consequent inability to imagine the river differently. Mis-perceptions of the river are ubiquitous in popular and technical discourses and have important implications for the ways in which the river is represented and imagined. We often underestimate the power these representations have. Though rivers are usually imagined as large, flowing bodies of water, harnessed or “trained” through technological prowess, urban rivers of western, central and peninsular India have highly varied characteristics, and are fundamentally different from their Himalayan or eastern counterparts. Owing to sub-humid conditions, large scale deforestation and land use conversion, agricultural and industrial intensification and consequent withdrawals, these rivers often have pronounced “Flow” and “Dry” phases. These rivers are technically classified as ‘Intermittent Rivers and Ephemeral Streams’ (IRES), a nomenclature that reflects their variable character, and consequently diverse communities of plants and animals inhabit their locales. Each stream sustained a diverse ecological regime and constituted its own singular landscape that varied in space and time. For this reason, these streams resist a facile taxonomy that sees them only in terms of the water they carry. When we shut out our streams from the city, we also shut out myriad life forms and banished ourselves from the larger community of life and the fabric of nature.
Over time and with the dissociation of (urban) communities from their local resources, there has been a historical shift away from these streams which are represented in everyday language and in city planning using the pejorative terms nullah, or “drain”. Accordingly, the city has “colonized” their floodplain, they have been barricaded behind concrete walls, and sewage and industrial waste has found its way into them. The bio-diverse and species-rich environments that harboured and nurtured millions of life-forms have been relegated behind concrete banks and neglected and forgotten.
The future?
Though much has been lost and destroyed, the picture is not necessarily bleak. Extensive river rejuvenation projects are being instituted and commissioned around the world with spectacular success. Socially vibrant, ecologically rich, they offer a multitude of benefits including good health and well-being, social and cultural inclusion, opportunities for education and interpretation, nature contact and stress relief, and mitigating floods. The question really is if we can imagine them differently, and apply sufficient pressure on our structures of governance to initiate necessary changes. For it is only when our cities learn to value and provide place for life in its myriad forms – like fireflies – that children will delight and play amongst them.
The author is Associate Professor at the Department of Landscape at the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal. In his teaching practice of over more than a decade, he has taught various courses, and served as a critic in several universities in India in the fields of architecture and landscape architecture. He is interested in notions of landscape, nature, aesthetics, and sustainability through experiences, and across disciplinary fields. His studies include urban parks and open spaces seen through the cultural and spatial practices that co-constitute place and identity. He has presented his work at conferences in India and abroad. He can be reached at popli.saurabh@gmail.com.
