An in-depth architectural analysis of Bhubaneswar’s urban flooding crisis, open drain hazards, and the IIT Roorkee stormwater management master plan
Dr. Amit Chatterjee
On the afternoon of July 4, 2026, a 35-year-old man named Anil Singh removed his slippers, stepped into Drain No. 4 near the main gate of Utkal University in Vani Vihar, and was never seen again. Anil was a ragpicker from the nearby Patharabandha slum. He made his living collecting plastic bottles from drain channels, a few rupees at a time, a sackful on a good morning. That day, the rain had been falling since early morning. He had already collected one sack. When the water rose further, he went back in for more. His companion, Masang Tudu, watched him slip into the fast-moving, muddy current and disappear. Rescue teams from Mancheswar Fire Services worked through the night. Divers went in repeatedly. The mayor herself reached the spot. No trace of Anil Singh has been found. The stretch of drain where he was lost had been left uncovered because construction work for a park project was still ongoing.
A man lost his life not in a river in spate, not in a cloudburst in the hills, but in an open city drain, in the middle of a planned state capital, on a regular monsoon afternoon. The city was briefly outraged. Then the rain eased, and the outrage did too.
Anil’s story is not Bhubaneswar’s alone. In Bengaluru, a 28-year-old civil engineer named Mithun Kumar stopped his two-wheeler during a heavy downpour to keep it from being pulled into a swollen stormwater drain. He was swept in instead. His body was found 40 hours and 750 metres later, lodged under an underbridge near Cambridge College.
In Hyderabad, a nine-year-old girl from Kalasiguda stepped out of her home on a rainy morning to buy groceries. She fell through a drain opening that was flooded and invisible under the water on the road. She did not come home. Two municipal engineers were suspended, and an ex-gratia payment of two lakh rupees was announced. The drain was never covered. These are not exceptional tragedies. They are the monsoon deaths that make the news. The ones that do not make the news are the ones we are left to guess at.
Seven Deaths in Eleven Years, in One City
Bhubaneswar has recorded at least seven deaths from people falling into open drains over the past eleven years. The vulnerable stretches are not unknown or remote: Gadagada, Chudanga Vihar, Jayadev Vihar, Shatabdi Nagar, Malisahi and Salia Sahi. These are residential and institutional neighbourhoods where people walk every day. The drains in these areas remain open—some mid-construction, some simply never completed. Every year, before the monsoon, the same warnings are issued. Every year, after the first heavy rain, the same images appear. And every few years, someone does not come home.
The problem extends far beyond any single city. Mumbai has officially identified 386 chronic flooding spots across the city; after years of remediation efforts, fewer than half have been fully addressed. Bengaluru, once defined by its network of interconnected lakes, has lost an estimated 4,238 hectares of lake area to encroachment. Land that once absorbed rain now has buildings on it. In Gurugram and Delhi-NCR, entire arterial roads flood predictably each July because the natural drainage channels beneath them have been built over without replacement. The story is the same across urban India, told in different accents: a city grows fast, loses sight of where its water goes, and is then surprised, year after year, when the water finds its own way back.
How Bhubaneswar Got Here
Bhubaneswar’s geography, to its credit, was never the problem. The city sits between the Kuakhai River to the east and the Daya River to the south, with roughly ten major open drains across a 103 sq. km catchment feeding into the Gangua Nala before it empties into the Daya. This was a rational system for the compact, carefully laid-out temple city of 1948. It has never been redesigned for the city that has since grown up around it—a metropolitan region where whole neighbourhoods, including Patia, Khandagiri and the northern fringes, have come up without ever being connected to a coherent drainage plan.
A peer-reviewed study of nearly four decades of rainfall data over Bhubaneswar (1980–2018) found something important: it is not just that we get more rain, but that it now falls more intensely, in shorter and sharper bursts, concentrated in the late afternoon and evening rather than spread throughout the day. The study links this directly to rapid, unplanned urbanisation. In other words, the way we have built the city is altering how rain behaves when it arrives. Paved surfaces that were once open earth now shed water at speed rather than absorbing it, sending surge after surge into drains that were never sized for this load.
Then there is what the water leaves behind. Relative humidity in the region has stayed above 86 percent every year since 2018, the sustained dampness that dengue- and malaria-carrying mosquitoes need. Khurda district, which includes Bhubaneswar, once recorded 212 dengue cases in just two monsoon months, more than triple its figure from the previous year. Localities such as Saheed Nagar and Shikharchandi Nagar have repeatedly topped the district’s list for mosquito density. Waterlogging is not only a traffic and infrastructure story; it is a public health emergency that arrives quietly, on two wings, weeks after the last puddle has dried.
There is, at last, movement in the right direction, and it deserves to be understood in full. In February 2025, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation signed a formal MoU with IIT Roorkee to develop a Comprehensive Stormwater Management Plan for the city. The project is being led by Prof. D. S. Arya from IIT Roorkee’s Department of Hydrology, one of the most experienced hydraulic engineering teams in the country. The methodology is rigorous: drone mapping, Total Station surveys and Differential GPS (DGPS) are being used to precisely map every drain, outfall and catchment boundary across the city. On top of that, IIT Roorkee will run hydraulic and dynamic simulations to model exactly how water moves through the Gangua Nala system under different rainfall scenarios, identifying where the bottlenecks are, what happens when the Daya River outfall backs up, and how new construction upstream affects flooding five kilometres downstream.
The plan projects to 2050, factoring in both population growth and climate change. It will also include a sensor-based flood alarm network and SCADA integration for real-time monitoring of pumping stations, along with a socio-environmental impact assessment that explicitly accounts for vulnerable communities such as Patharabandha, the very slum where Anil Singh lived. As of October 2025, the Odisha Housing and Urban Development Minister confirmed that the master plan was nearing completion and that the Detailed Project Report (DPR) would follow shortly, after which physical construction could begin. This is, without question, the most serious scientific intervention this city’s drainage has ever received. But a plan, however good, is only as strong as what happens after it is submitted.
The Design Problem Nobody Talks About
As an architect, I want to raise something that rarely enters the monsoon-damage conversation: this is not purely a civic engineering failure. It is a design failure that begins at the level of every individual plot. Every courtyard paved corner to corner to “make full use” of the land, every compound wall that channels all roof and surface runoff straight onto the street, and every new layout approved without checking the gradient of the ground beneath it—these are design decisions, and they collectively determine how much water the city’s drains must carry.
The areas that flood hardest in Bhubaneswar—Patia, Saheed Nagar, Rasulgarh and the stretch near the High Court—are where unplanned densification has been most intense. A building that sheds all its rainfall load onto the public road is, in hydrological terms, an unfunded liability passed on to a drainage system that was already at capacity.
What Must Change
This will not change with one intervention or one monsoon season. It requires multiple, coordinated actions at different scales, pursued together and without waiting for the next death to make them politically convenient:
1. Cover every open drain, immediately and completely.
Anil Singh died in an uncovered drain left open mid-construction. The locations of Bhubaneswar’s uncovered drains—in Gadagada, Jayadev Vihar, Shatabdi Nagar, Salia Sahi and elsewhere—are already documented. A time-bound programme to cover and grate every last open stretch before the next monsoon season is not ambitious; it is the minimum that seven deaths in eleven years demands.
2. Desilt and clear drains before June, with public accountability.
Drain capacity shrinks every year because of silt, garbage and construction debris. Bhubaneswar needs mandatory, completed desilting before the first monsoon rain, not after. Every ward should publish its own updated list of chronic flooding spots, following Mumbai’s model of tracking its 386 problem stretches, with a named responsible officer and a hard, public deadline for clearance.
3. Rewrite building rules to address runoff, not just footprint.
Every new building sanction should specify where its rainwater goes. A mandatory limit on the proportion of any plot that can be fully paved, combined with genuinely enforced rainwater harvesting as a condition for the occupancy certificate—not just at the sanction stage—would meaningfully reduce the runoff load that now arrives entirely at the public drain.
4. Build small-scale absorption into neighbourhoods, not just pipes underground.
Ward parks and green belts can accommodate detention ponds and bioswales—shallow, planted channels that slow and absorb the first, heaviest hour of any downpour before it reaches the drain network at all. These are cheap, low-maintenance measures that can be retrofitted into existing open spaces without large infrastructure budgets. Several Indian cities are beginning to explore them; Bhubaneswar’s green cover makes it well placed to do so.
5. Make the IIT Roorkee plan the backbone of every future decision in this city.
This is the critical one, and it needs to be said plainly. The hydraulic model being built by Prof. D. S. Arya’s team is not a report to be filed; it is a living map of how water moves through Bhubaneswar.
Once the DPR is finalised, three things must happen. First, the drainage model must become a shared, continuously updated platform, accessible to BMC, the Bhubaneswar Development Authority, the Public Health Engineering Organisation and every ward office. Not a PDF; a working database.
Second, no new layout, apartment complex, commercial development or road project should receive sanction without a hydraulic clearance check against this model. Every new building adds to the runoff load somewhere downstream; the model now makes it possible to calculate exactly where and how much.
Third, the sensor-based flood alarm system and SCADA monitoring for pumping stations must be operationalised before the next monsoon—not as a future phase, but as the earliest deliverable from this collaboration. A real-time picture of drain levels and pump performance during a heavy rain event is something Bhubaneswar has never had. It would allow the corporation to respond in minutes rather than hours.
The plan also includes a socio-environmental impact assessment. That assessment must specifically address communities such as Patharabandha, Malisahi and Salia Sahi—the slum-adjacent settlements that sit closest to the city’s most dangerous open drains. The people who are most exposed to the risk of flooding are the people who have the least say in how the city is built. A drainage plan that does not explicitly protect them is not a complete plan.
6. Protect what is still intact.
The Gangua Nala and the natural catchment areas on the city’s edges must be protected from encroachment through real enforcement, not periodic notices. Bengaluru’s loss of more than 4,000 hectares of lake area took decades; recovering even a fraction of that capacity has cost the city far more than protecting it would have. Bhubaneswar still has the option of learning from that example rather than repeating it.
7. Respond to the health crisis that follows the water.
Flood response cannot end when the streets look dry. Vector-control operations must reach known hotspots in Saheed Nagar, Shikharchandi Nagar and similar localities before the first rains, based on the previous year’s dengue and mosquito data. The public health consequences of waterlogging are predictable; we simply choose, each year, to be surprised by them.
Bhubaneswar was planned in 1948 on the belief that a thoughtfully designed city could offer people a better life. That belief is still sound. It only needs to be extended, finally and without further delay, to the drains beneath our feet and to everyone who walks beside them.
(The author is an architect and Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at VSSUT, Burla. Views expressed are personal.)