Let Mithi flow
The government said: high tide water, acting like a wall. Rubbish. The tide, on July 26, was at its highest at 15:50 hours, just four and a half hours after it had started raining; in the next three days, it did not peak much (see table: Tidal lie). So what went wrong? On July 27, at a press conference, Vilasrao Deshmukh thundered: "Too much rain, drainage not at fault'. But Mumbai's stormwater drainage network (swdn) is over 70 years old. "The British constructed it to handle run-off capacity of 25 millimetre (mm) per hour at low tide, just by rule of thumb. It is now 2005. Mumbai's population has exploded and the built-up area has increased rapidly. Also, the monsoon pattern has changed. But the drainage system has only crumbled,' laments Kapil Gupta, professor at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai.
According to the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (mcgm), Mumbai's