Oh, for a pedaloTHE city of Chennai is slogging through a season of misery. Once called Madras, the coastal capital of Tamil Nadu, with a population of 8.7m, has been largely under water for over a month. On a single day, December 1st, it had nearly half a metre (20 inches) of rain—about as much as San Francisco gets in a year. Some 450 people have died, including 18 who perished in a hospital that lost its power supply. Perhaps 1.8m, mostly the poorest, have been displaced. The cost has yet to be tallied. Chennai’s proud new high-tech quarter was among the worst-flooded.
If the disaster was an act of God, it was abetted by human folly. The role that global warming plays in storms is disputed, but bad city planning surely compounded the damage. One question is whether the rest of India’s storm-swept Coromandel coast will learn from Chennai.
The city has grown willy-nilly. For decades if not centuries it has absorbed the countryside by growing around and over wetlands and, in the early days, incorporating the traditional tanks, or wells, of South Indian agriculture into its temples. In the era of concrete, the...Continue reading
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