From Bengaluru to Mumbai to Pune, metro projects are colliding with India’s monsoons

**Rachel Varghese** (0:02)
In September 2022, Bangalore faced the worst urban flood in recent history. Areas like Belandur, Marthahalli and Mahadevapura, all part of the Outer Ring Road or ORR were submerged. And all these areas also happened to be where phase 2A of the metro's Blue Line was under active construction.
But this April, when a monsoon preparedness meeting was underway in Bangalore, the Metro Corporation or BMRCL was absent. In fact, it had been absent all the years before as well. Why? Well, simply because it was never included. Their absence this time didn't just stand out to my colleague, the Ken reporter, Mrunmai Kulkarni, because of the floods that happened in 2022 It was because just weeks after this particular monsoon preparedness meeting, a hailstorm hit the city. And it was an aggressive one. Trees were uprooted and 8 people died when a hospital's compound wall collapsed near them.
And the flooded areas, Shivajinagar, Richmond Circle and MG Road, sat directly above the upcoming underground Pink Line. Now, this problem isn't just limited to Bangalore's metro lines. For example, in Mumbai, the Acharya Atre Chowk station on Metro Line 3 flooded just 17 days after its inauguration in May last year. In Pune, again by May 2025, the additional commissioner of the municipal corporation publicly attributed nearly 30 new waterlogging sites to how the metro construction had altered drainage patterns. By the way, this was on top of more than 200 sites that had already been identified. Which means, even as India spends more than 2 lakh crore rupees to build them, the metro lines end up flooding the cities that they are meant to fix. And Ranmay, who is with me in the studio today, explains how the flooding problem lies in this significant gap between the agencies building the city's infrastructure and the ones managing its drainage.
Hi, I'm Ranmay. Thank you so much for joining us yet again on Daybreak. And I'm really excited to talk about this story because it's about urban flooding. And you know that's something that affects all of us, especially in Bangalore. And I'm from Bombay, so from my experiences in Bombay as well, I know how difficult it can be to exist in a city that has just poor urban planning and floods as soon as it rains. So you start this story about how there was a hailstorm and an accident because of the hailstorm in Bangalore, towards the end of April.
And that's one thing that made you take the story up and follow it through. So could you tell us a bit about what happened that day and why it was a sign of a deeper problem and how does it tie into metro constructions?

**Mrunmai Kulkarni** (3:21)
Hi, Rachel. It's so nice to be back on Daybreak. I think this is like my fifth or sixth time recording with you guys.

**Rachel Varghese** (3:29)
Yeah.

**Mrunmai Kulkarni** (3:30)
Yeah. So basically what happened that day, end of April, as you know, as anyone living in Bangalore really knows, April is when we get the pre-monsoon showers. And they are usually a lot harsher than the monsoon showers that we have because it rains a lot. It floods a lot. We act surprised every single time it happens. And what happened was that I was at home with our dog, and it started hailing and our dog got super surprised as to what was happening. And I was following the news as to what was going on. I was on Twitter checking what was happening in most areas. And that's when I heard that a wall collapsed near Victoria Hospital. And a few people were crushed under it. There were a couple of deaths. And it did remind me of the flooding that had happened a few years ago in Bangalore.
I was concerned that all the stories I read around April were of the same type, that roads are getting flooded, walls are collapsing.
So I started to look a little deeper into it, like who's actually responsible for the mechanism. And that's how the story happened.

**Rachel Varghese** (4:39)
Like you said, we're surprised every time this happens.
And one of the ironies that your story gets into is how there was a monsoon preparedness meeting just a couple of weeks before this happened. So what exactly was the result of that meeting? And why was there no preparedness?

**Mrunmai Kulkarni** (4:57)
Okay, so like you mentioned, there are monsoon preparedness meetings. They happen almost every summer. And I had gone to a couple of them this year.
I was in the meeting rooms. It was like I mentioned in the story that they always have the same type of coffee. And for some reason, like butter cookies, which everyone eyes, nobody really takes. And I noticed that a lot of corporations were part of the meetings. The BBMP, I mean, sorry, the Greater Bangalore Authority office is where it usually happens. The BWSOP was part of it. The Electricity Corporation was part of it. And there was talk about desilting the lakes, maybe clearing out the stormwater drains, things like that. The BMRCL, that is the Metro Corporation, it was not part of the meeting. And I went back and verified it wasn't part of any of the monsoon preparedness meetings that had taken place in the city. And that's when I realized it hadn't been included in the conversations a few years ago either.