On the Brink: Intense monsoon floods are hampering South Asia’s COVID-19 response

Earlier this month, in India’s commercial and financial capital Mumbai, 294mm of rain fell in a single 12-hour period. The city received nearly a year’s worth of rainfall in just one month. The deluge was exacerbated by battering winds that reached speeds in excess of 100kph. For Mumbai residents, whose lives have already been severely disrupted by the pandemic, the flooding has brought further misery. This is especially true for the city’s vulnerable and disadvantaged living in slums and informal housing, has left them even more exposed to the virus.

Mumbai’s story is not unique. Floods and landslides have killed over a 100 people in Nepal, while an estimated one-third of Bangladesh’s land area is said to have come under water. The crisis has galvanised international support. Climate activist Greta Thunberg and the European Union have made contributions to support the relief efforts. As such, it’s tempting to say that this year’s monsoon has been extraordinary. But numerous studies have shown a recent increase in extreme precipitation events – marked by heavier rainfall over shorter periods of time – across the region.

South Asia’s unique geography is, of course, a factor. The Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, emanating from the headwaters of the Tibetan Plateau, support an estimated 700 million people in the region. They are a vital source of water, energy and food to the sub-continent. But a recent study by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Research suggests that climate change is stressing these great civilisational waterways. Glacial melt in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush Himalayas, often referred to as the region’s “third pole”, is directly contributing to outburst flooding, landslides and other extreme events. As rivers cross boundaries, the risks from upstream events are magnified downstream, exposing multiple nations to increased flood and disaster risks. Numerous river and water cooperation agreements exist between countries in the region, but the scale and magnitude of these transboundary floods has rendered them largely useless.

Successive infrastructure intensive policy interventions have also served to compound what is now a chronic seasonal problem. Large engineering works such as dams and embankments on paper  serve a purpose, but more often than not they make things worse. . Take the example of the Koshi river that flows from Nepal into parts of northern India. For decades, governments on both sides of the border have invested in flood control measures that include the construction of embankments aimed at taming the river’s flow. Several studies indicate that these man-made structures do more harm than good, causing widespread erosion, water logging, and siltation.

In 2008, a breach in one of the embankments caused severe flooding in parts of Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar, sparking a humanitarian and natural disaster on either side. Cut to 2020, and the Koshi is in spate again. As governments on both sides of the border enter a now familiar blame game, those who have lost their homes and livelihoods are again left wondering why. As with all humanitarian crises and natural disasters, it is the most vulnerable populations – women and children, ethnic minority communities – that have felt the impacts most acutely. The flood relief camps that house them, already hotbeds of water-borne disease, are highly susceptible to COVID-19 outbreaks.

For decades, technocratic approaches to dealing with nature have dominated pedagogy, practice, and policy in South Asia. Large infrastructure projects are widely viewed as symbols of economic growth and development. They are politically popular and economically productive, boasting a fiscal multiplier effect that promises lucrative contracts for businesses and potential employment opportunities. Dams, bridges, embankments, canals and river linking projects are celebrated even as they re-engineer nature and the natural flow of rivers and other water resources. The effects are often devastating.