Mumbai flooding is 'our own creation', stop blaming civic body: Bombay High Court

The Bombay High Court pulled no punches in its assessment of Mumbai's annual flooding crisis, declaring that the waterlogging that paralyses the city every monsoon is 'our own creation' and cautioning against reflexively blaming the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. The court's remarks came as Mumbai was placed under an orange alert and schools were ordered shut due to heavy rainfall.

The observation signals judicial impatience with a cycle that repeats itself year after year: torrential rain, flooded roads, an 8-km jam in Gurugram, road cave-ins, and a chorus of public blame directed at civic authorities. The court's point — that residents, builders, and encroachers collectively destroy the natural drainage systems and then expect a single civic body to compensate — is one that urban planners have made for years without political traction.

Mumbai's flooding problem is structural. Decades of construction on mangroves, filling of nullahs, and unchecked encroachment on floodplains have systematically degraded the city's capacity to absorb rainfall. The BMC, for all its failings in implementation, operates within a landscape that citizens and builders have fundamentally compromised.

With the monsoon now in full force across India's west coast and major cities from Mumbai to Gurugram reporting severe inundation, the High Court's remarks offer a moment of judicial candour that politicians and developers have long been reluctant to provide.