Yellow school buses stood stranded in brown, rain-filled roads. At Subhash Chowk, water rose around vehicles as traffic disappeared into the monsoon chaos. Inside at least 12 school buses, children waited for hours while parents struggled to reach them. Elsewhere, commuters waded through knee-deep water as familiar roads turned into temporary rivers.
This was Gurugram on Monday, 24 August, after the city received around 75 mm of rain between 8 am and 5 pm. Sohna Road, Rajiv Chowk, IFFCO Chowk, Sheetla Mata Road and parts of Old Gurugram were among the areas badly affected. By Tuesday, the administration had advised schools to move classes online and offices to work from home.
For a city known for glass towers, sprawling offices and luxury housing, the sight raises a familiar question: why does Gurugram struggle so much when the rain comes?
The answer may lie not just in its drains, but in what existed before them.
Before the glass towers, there were fields
In the 1960s, Gurgaon was a much smaller town, surrounded by agricultural land and villages. Farming shaped everyday life, while open fields, ponds and natural drainage channels gave rainwater room to move and seep into the ground.
Before concrete reshaped Gurugram, fields, ponds and natural channels gave rainwater space to soak in and flow. Photograph: (AI generated using reference)
Then the city began changing.
Maruti’s arrival in 1981 brought industry and jobs. From the 1990s, private developers transformed agricultural land into housing colonies, commercial spaces and roads. The IT boom accelerated that growth further, turning Gurgaon into the corporate hub we know today.
Between 1989 and 2012, the city’s urbanisable area expanded nearly threefold, from about 9,900 acres to over 27,000 acres.
The transformation brought homes, jobs and infrastructure. But beneath the concrete, something else was disappearing: the landscape’s natural ability to handle rain.
So, why does Gurugram flood?
Imagine the old landscape as a sponge.
Fields, ponds, lakes and soil could absorb some of the rain. Natural channels could carry the rest towards larger water bodies. Replace those surfaces with buildings, roads and parking lots, and much more rain becomes surface runoff.
As Gurugram expanded from farmland into a corporate hub, fields and open spaces gave way to roads, buildings and other impervious surfaces. Photograph: (Hindustan Times)
That is exactly the problem Gurugram now faces. As its built-up area expanded, so did its impervious surfaces — places where water cannot easily seep into the ground. More rain therefore runs across roads and into drains at once, increasing the pressure on an already stretched drainage network.
The city has also lost natural water storage. Gurugram had hundreds of water bodies in the past; an assessment submitted to the National Green Tribunal found that 389 had disappeared over 66 years, leaving 251 from the 640 recorded in 1956.
And when natural drainage channels are altered, narrowed or blocked, rainwater has fewer pathways to escape.
The result is what residents see every monsoon: water arrives faster than the city can move it.
Can Gurugram learn to live with rain again?
Perhaps the answer isn’t simply to keep adding bigger drains.
One promising approach is to give rainwater places to stay before it reaches the roads. Researchers modelling Gurugram’s flood-prone areas have suggested retention ponds and other sustainable drainage systems that can temporarily store rainwater and allow it to seep into the ground. Their modelling identified 18 potential retention ponds that could help reduce flood volumes.
Retention ponds, rain gardens and porous surfaces could give rainwater somewhere to go — before it reaches the roads. Photograph: (Hindustan Times)
Porous surfaces, rain gardens, restored ponds, green spaces and protected natural drainage channels can work in the same direction — slowing the water down instead of simply trying to push it away faster.
For a city that grew by replacing fields with concrete, perhaps part of the answer is to bring some of that lost breathing space back.
Because Gurugram cannot stop the monsoon.
But it can decide whether the next heavy downpour turns its roads into rivers — or gives rain somewhere else to go.
