The city that forgot how to flow

"Every heavy downpour today overwhelms Kolkata's capacity to breathe. Once a city of canals and wetlands, it now gasps beneath its own concrete.

- BISWABRATA GOSWAMI

When the skies opened over Kolkata this monsoon, the city did not merely get wet—it drowned in its own forgetfulness.

The rain came down in torrents, but what followed was not nature’s fury alone; it was a man-made disaster decades in the making. Streets vanished beneath fetid water, power lines sizzled in submerged lanes, and the rhythmic life of the city—its trams, bazaars, and para corners—fell eerily silent.

This was not the Kolkata that the British had engineered nor the one the Hooghly once embraced. Beneath the asphalt and apartment blocks lies a forgotten hydrological city—a labyrinth of silted canals, dead rivers, and suffocated wetlands that once kept the monsoon at bay. The tragedy today is not that Kolkata floods; it is that it no longer knows how not to.

Once a delicate balance of river, rain, and tide, the city’s hydro-geomorphic system now reels under unregulated urbanisation, ecological amnesia, and infrastructural decay. What was once a water city has turned into a water trap.

At least eleven people died in the recent deluge, many electrocuted. Experts warn this was not an isolated disaster but the outcome of decades of ecological neglect and unregulated development. Beneath the city’s dazzling skyline lies a forgotten network of rivers, canals, and marshes that once absorbed the monsoon’s excess and made life on this fragile delta possible.

A Delta Beneath the City

Kolkata sits on the lower deltaic plain of the Ganga-Brahmaputra river system—specifically on the western most distributary of the Ganga Delta, the Hooghly River. The land here is flat, low-lying, and built from layers of unconsolidated sediments: clay, silt, sand, and gravel deposited over millennia.