Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
Once a land of mustard fields and 60 natural canals, Gurgaon is now smothered in impervious concrete. With just four natural drains left, every monsoon turns streets into rivers and basements into bathtubs.
The city slopes north from the Aravallis, but planners laid roads and buildings with zero regard for gravity. Now, rainwater rushes the wrong way, and Google Earth shows it clearly — disaster is by design.
Maps from the 1920s show water channels that no longer exist. Replaced by malls and luxury apartments, these ancient veins of the city were paved over like they never mattered — until the floods came.
Gurgaon's layout isn’t a city — it’s a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. With land acquired piecemeal by private developers, roads end abruptly, drains are an afterthought, and logic is nowhere in sight.
Touted as India’s 21st-century urban dream, Gurgaon is more cautionary tale than case study. Cars float, lights flicker, and every rainfall feels like a reckoning — a modern city built on medieval planning.
Architect Suptendu Biswas says the solution might be French — not Parisian flair, but French drains: gravel-filled trenches that let water seep into the earth. Simple, effective, and still ignored.
Credit: Srinivas School of Architecture
Gurgaon gets only 600 mm of rain annually — five times less than Kochi — yet it drowns every monsoon. This isn’t a climate problem; it’s a policy failure wrapped in a concrete coffin.
With DLF and others buying up 52 villages, Gurgaon was never planned — it was parcelled. The result? Irregular plots, aimless roads, and zero coordination. Capitalism built it, but common sense skipped town.
There’s talk of ‘smart cities,’ but no room for soil. India’s engineering codes ignore earth as a building material entirely — and Gurgaon is living, flooding proof that nature doesn’t like being erased.