Delhi crosses annual rain mark, Gurugram flooded again amid downpour

The city passed this threshold even sooner in 2021, when it got 780.1mmof rain by August 1, and 1,526.8mm of rain all year.

Delhi crossed its annual rainfall quota on Saturday, with nearly four-and-a-half months of the year still to go, after a strong spell of showers across the city and the National Capital Region (NCR) flooded streets and set off traffic mayhem, especially in Gurugram.

A waterlogged stretch of the NH-48 in Gurugram on Saturday. (Parveen Kumar/HT Photo)

Read here: Waterlogging in Delhi, Gurugram after heavy morning rain; traffic disrupted

The Safdarjung station, representative of the city’s weather, has received 775.8mm rain so far this year, surpassing the annual average of 774.4mm, with 12 days remaining in August — the city’s wettest month — and more than a third of the year still to come, according to data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD).

The city passed this threshold even sooner in 2021, when it got 780.1mmof rain by August 1, and 1,526.8mm of rain all year. Last year, Delhi recorded 811.4mm of rain.

To be sure, the city logs a bulk of its rainfall in the monsoon months of June, July and August. The last four months of the year only receive a combined 152.6mmof rain.

Still, showers on Saturday morning took commuters by surprise and inundated several parts of the Capital, with reports of waterlogging in Najafgarh, Punjabi Bagh and neighbourhoods along the Outer Ring Road.

Shivam Chouhan, a resident of Patparganj, said, “I almost missed my flight in the morning as traffic was very slow because of the rains. This was exacerbated by people taking shelters at several places under flyovers, blocking other vehicles.”

Traffic police officers said they sent real-time alerts out to inform commuters of the waterlogging in a bunch of areas and also stationed extra personnel to help keep traffic moving.

“We deployed more personnel around Outer Ring Road and at the Delhi-Gurugram border, but traffic remained smooth as it was a weekend. Flooding cleared out in most of the waterlogged areas quickly,” said a traffic police officer.

Authorities in Delhi have been on alert for weeks, after Yamuna’s waters hit record levels in July, forcing the administration to evacuate people living on the river’s floodplains en masse and disrupting life in the city for days.

Even as officials pointed to the river’s swelling waters — which peaked at 208.66m on July 13, above the danger mark of 207.33m — for those floods, experts said the city’s archaic sewerage network and the lack of a proper drainage master plan had only compounded the Capital’s miseries.

Once again, though, Gurugram bore the brunt of the rain, with swathes of Millennium City going under on Saturday, leaving commuters on the road for several hours amid bumper-to-bumper queues as traffic came to a standstill.

According to the weather department, Gurugram received 62mm of rainfall in the 24 hours till 5.30pm on Saturday.

The busy NH-48 was hit the hardest, though few neighbourhoods were spared in what has been a recurrent problem for the city for years now.

Experts and residents have blamed Gurugram’s poor drainage network, unplanned constructions and ever-mushrooming traffic for the persistent rain mess.

Officials said they received complaints of flooding from the Narsinghpur stretch of the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, areas near Iffco Chowk Metro station, as well as neighbourhoods in and around Hero Honda Chowk, Rajiv Chowk, Vatika Chowk, Iffco Chowk, Kherki Daula, Golf Course Extension Road, Southern Peripheral Road, Udyog Vihar, Sohna Road, Basai, Khandsa Road and Pataudi Road.

Delhi has recorded rain every month this year so far, except February, and the actual rain has been higher than normal in all of these months.

Read here: Waterlogging in key stretches after heavy rain lashes Gurugram

In January, the city clocked 20.4mm of rain, as against a normal of 19.1mm. In March, Delhi got 53.2mm, against the normal of 17.4mm. This number fell to 20.1mm in April (when the normal is 16.3mm), rose to 111mm in May (30.7mm), 101.7mm in June (74.1mm) and 384.6mm in July (209.7mm).

So far this month, the Capital has received 84.8mm of rain.

IMD predicted some light rain for the city in the days ahead.

‘“Generally cloudy skies with light rain or drizzle may be seen till Tuesday with possibility of thundershowers. The days will remain hot,” the agency said in its forecast on Saturday.

Despite the showers, Delhi was hotter than usual on Saturday.

The maximum temperature was 37.4 degrees Celsius (°C), four above normal, and the minimum was 28.2°C, two above normal.