Mumbai’s New Aqua Line Metro Floods In Monsoon Downpour, Raising Questions On Infrastructure Preparedness
The thundershowers in Mumbai usually bare the real face of the city, certainly its shortcomings, of which there are many—flooded roads, disrupted railway networks, dislocation of buses and other transport modes, people struggling to wade through the unrelenting waters, filth and sewage mixed with rainwater in places, building crashes, roofs collapsing, roads caving in and so on.
However, it surprised many to see that the brand-new 17-day-old underground metro station at Acharya Atre Chowk near Worli was inundated too and suffered damage to its systems when the skies opened up over Mumbai this Monday, bringing July-like thundershowers in May. Its name, ‘Aqua Line’, got a new meaning that day.
As news clips and citizens’ videos of the flooded metro station and the damage to it went viral on media platforms, they laid bare, once again, the extreme difficulties in making Mumbai’s infrastructure flood-proof, if not the best in the world.
This underground metro line running 33.5 kilometres from SEEPZ in Andheri all along the city’s length to the edge of Cuffe Parade at the southern tip evoked derision and fear with good reason. About half its length is currently operational, and the inundated station was inaugurated only days ago.
Built at a whopping project cost of Rs 37,276 crore, the Aqua Line is the showcase of Mumbai’s recent infrastructure upgrades. If this can flood in a devastating manner, causing services to be stopped at that station, Mumbaikars rightly question the safety of the entire underground system itself.
Authorities took pains to reassure Mumbaikars, but it’s a difficult task. It is a fact that the Aqua Line stations are situated more than a metre above the road level to take care of frequent flooding in Mumbai’s monsoon and that many of its other operational stations did not face severe flooding or other rain-related issues.
However, the public perception that the super-expensive underground metro is as susceptible to the city’s annual floods as the ramshackle railway trains and that its planning and quality of construction are not to be fully trusted will be difficult to change. Nearly 20,000 use the line daily now, and it is expected to carry 1.3 million a day when the line is fully operational.
The monsoon not only set in this year in May itself, but it also broke the all-time rainfall record for the month with 439 mm, leaving the previous record of 279.4 mm from May 1918 far behind. Such rain is expected to cause some damage to urban infrastructure, but, in the case of the Aqua Line, doubts arise from its grand claim to be world-class but buckling in like any other piece of infrastructure in the city.
The flooding across Mumbai has been exacerbated by the relentless hacking of trees, which are yet to be seen as flood warriors. Ironically, the Aqua Line authorities chopped down more than 2,200 trees in Aarey overnight in 2019 for its car shed despite citizens’ protests; transplanted trees have not bloomed either.
news