“Ye re, ye re pausa, tula deto paisa, paisa jhala khota, paus jhala mota” (Rains, rains; please come, I will give you money; the money was spurious, the rain increased its fury) was the Marathi poem taught to us in school in 1960. We recited it dancing in the rains of Mumbai. We loved the rains, as children. Monsoons meant new umbrellas, rubber shoes, hot savouries, perhaps a school holiday, even a picnic to a fort or a hill station.

Now, the annual monsoons are becoming a nightmare. It is indeed an ignominy that despite the experiences of decades, cities and villages get flooded within a few hours. In early July this year, the city of Mumbai simply collapsed due to flooding in many parts.

Mumbai gets inundated with floods annually because the city is a combination of seven islands. The combined island of 603.4 square kilometres is small for a population of 22 million people. Trees and mangroves have made way for high-rise buildings. The transport infrastructure is archaic and has not developed in line with the growing needs of the city. The suburban rail network is the main artery of the town. It is clogged with 7.5 million passengers daily, which is about the size of the population of many countries. Every year the tracks are covered with water and the trains grind to a halt, crippling the city.

The Monorail has not commenced and is entangled in technical snags and bureaucratic bungling. The public bus service is devalued due to traffic congestion. A journey of 20 minutes on a weekend, can take 90 minutes on a working day, due to traffic jams. Open gutters swallow a few people annually.

Slums are pervasive in Mumbai, 40 percent of the population of the city lives in them, occupying vast tracts of land. If the slum dwellers were properly housed, land could be released for public parks, mangroves and trees. Mumbai is becoming a nightmare and is gradually collapsing.

The government has to decongest Mumbai city and develop it simultaneously. No more office or residential building construction should be permitted within the city. We need to build a new mega city. The entire area between Mumbai and Pune town should be developed into a new city. This modern mega city should have the latest modes of transport, roads, residential buildings and clearly earmarked areas for factories, schools and playgrounds. Let us learn some lessons from Le Corbusier, the architect who designed Brazil’s well-planned capital, Brasilia.

There is a need to deploy technology to solve the flooding problems of Mumbai. We need drones to monitor the water logging and for pictures to be flashed on TVs, mobiles, etc., so people know whether or not to proceed to work. The pictures from drones would also enable weather forecasters to be more accurate.

We need high capacity pumps at various flood prone areas like Hindmata, Dadar TT, Sion circle, Worli, etc., to remove the water from the streets. We must double the drainage capacity of the city, built by the British. The population of the city has increased from 3 million in 1956 to about 22 million now.

Moreover, the entire suburban rail network needs to be raised by at least 18 inches. This is a marathon project, but it needs to be executed if Mumbai is to survive.

The teething problems of the Metro rail should also be resolved immediately, so that it takes some pressure off the local roads and rail network. Thailand has Skytrains in most parts of Bangkok, thus reducing traffic pressure on the roads. Mumbai needs to do the same.

The proposed plan to build elevated roads above the city’s Western Express and Eastern Express highways is sound and urgently required. The construction will create massive traffic snarls and confusion for the next two to three years, but it is in the long-term interest of this crumbling city. However, the raised roads are not the only panacea for the city. There is also a need to build a coastal road all the way from Vasai to Nariman Point, by reclaiming fresh land from the sea, to be deployed exclusively, for a coastal road. No buildings should be permitted on this reclaimed land. Moreover, the Sea Link from Bandra should be extended to Nariman Point at the earliest to relieve congestion at Worli Naka and Haji Ali signals.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised 100 new cities in India in 2014. So I voted for him. However, even the locations or the blueprints of many of these 100 cities have yet to see the light of the day. Now, I am disillusioned.

When we were young, we enjoyed reciting various poems on the rains. In our teenage years, rains were synonymous with romance. However, now the rains only bring misery and mayhem every year. In the recent miraculous Thai cave rescue, Indian pumps removed the water from the caves. So, why can we not remove water from the streets of our own cities?

The author works as a Management Consultant in Mumbai. He is the author of “Business Express: An Odyssesy Of Ideas And Sensitivities”.