Urban Flooding as an Emerging Challenge: Evidences from Chennai City

Urban encroachment has increased with very high pace in the late twentieth century, which has resulted in the agglomeration of people in a very small area. This in turn leads to negative impact on aquatic as well as terrestrial ecosystem. Adverse effect like floods, water logging, water scarcity, water-borne diseases and other negative impacts destroys human life and socio-economic prosperity to a great extent. Such problems occur because of inadequate control of urban area and haphazard growth which shows bad impact on the urban drainage system, solid water management, hygiene, potable water and river flooding to urban flooding. Researchers have been and are underway in the area of natural and human-made disasters to study the exclusive effect of such unforeseen events. Urban flooding is becoming a recurrent phenomenon in various Indian cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. With the key objective to identify the causes of urban floods in Chennai and its socio-economic impact on the entire city, the local perception about the urban floods has been analysed as a reference for further adaptation. What can be done to prevent such events and what administration has to do? Primary survey as well as secondary data sets has been referred for collecting various data related to flood event. Reports from Indian Meteorological Department citing very strong El-Nino and various other factors led to very heavy rainfall has also been accessed. The study is based on descriptive and analytical research, whereby both qualitative and quantitative approaches have been used to analyse the data. There is no doubt about that state government of Tamil Nadu has failed to control the water drainage system in Chennai. Based on the international experience in terms of urban floods and comprehend indigenous knowledge about the urban floods, and its impact, a household survey was conducted in December 2016 at Chennai in Tamil Nadu. Arc GIS, several statistical techniques have been used to get the desired result. After the discussion, it was evaluated that plastics, poor drainage system, blockage in the runoff, concretisation of the city and settlements on both sides of river channel were some of the factors obstructing the outflow of water from the city to the sea, resulting in urban floods.