UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF LAW IN ADDRESSING URBAN FLOODS

Urban flooding in India has come to be framed as a failure of either climate or infrastructure. We argue instead that it is a governance and legal accountability crisis, reflective of the potential (and impending) failure of the law. Drawing on recent floods, such as the Punjab floods, and landmark episodes of urban flooding in Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, and northern India, we demonstrate that flooding is a largely foreseeable and preventable phenomenon under existing statutory and policy regimes. In an interdisciplinary, yet law-centric manner, we examine India’s disaster management architecture, its urban planning statutes, environmental statutes, and constitutional decentralisation framework, alongside selected High Court and Supreme Court judgments. We demonstrate that while the Courts are happy to “constitutionalise” infrastructure failure through recourse to rights-based reasoning, they simultaneously impose doctrinal barriers to prospective judicial creation of resilience standards in the absence of clear legislative mandates. The result we are left with is a world of fragmented governance, where resilience is espoused in rhetoric but rarely as an enforceable planning obligation. We argue that urban flooding does not defeat the law, but rather is a symptom of the failure to translate existing legal norms into binding, preventive, and institutionally coordinated governance. We argue for embedding hydrological resilience within the statutory planning regime, municipal finance regime, and participatory governance structures, advocating for a repositioning of resilience as a permanent legal obligation, rather than a post-disaster success.