Verma, Samar

Living with the monsoon: Governance, geography, and resilience in Gurugram - Economic & Political Weekly - 61(6), Feb 7, 2026: p.63-66

This paper examines recurrent monsoon flooding in Gurugram not as an aberrant climate event or an engineering failure alone, but as a crisis of urban knowledge and governance. Drawing on media reports, governance assessments and practitioner evidence from the Gurgaon Water Forum, it shows how speculative, enclave-led urbanisation has disrupted historic blue−green networks, concentrated risk on low-income residents and produced fragmented responsibility for drainage. The paper situates recent floods within longer histories of agrarian urbanism, land conversion and unequal citizenship. It argues for treating monsoon as a year-round governance function anchored in watershed-sensitive planning, and for making “data as daily practice” central to design, maintenance and response. By foregrounding multiple knowers—engineers, residents, civil society groups and agrarian memory—it outlines a people-centred approach to resilience that aligns technical systems with the city’s socioecological realities and with Gurugram’s changing political economy.-Reproduced

https://www.epw.in/journal/review-urban-affairs/living-monsoon.html