Climate Change Is Stretching Mumbai to Its Limit

Photographs by Arko Datto

Rain had been falling for several hours on the night of July 18, 2021, when the Tiwaris called their relatives and told them to evacuate their house.

The Tiwaris live in suburban Mumbai, in the hillside shantytown of Surya Nagar, and their relatives were perched in one of a row of single-room tenements atop the steep terrain. Some of those homes had collapsed in a landslide two years earlier and had been recently rebuilt. Now, as the rain thundered on, the Tiwaris began to worry.

Suddenly, the slope disintegrated into a torrent of mud and rock, the sound of the slide drowned out by the heavy rain. Before the Tiwaris’ relatives could make it to safety, their ceiling collapsed. Mud and debris washed down to the Tiwaris’ door. They struggled to get out of their own house, and then out of their narrow lane. By the end of the night, 10 people in Surya Nagar, including three children, had been crushed to death. The Tiwaris lost three family members, and 21 more lives were lost in another landslide nearby.

By the end of last year’s monsoon season, an estimated 50 Mumbai residents had died in landslides or wall and house collapses triggered by heavy rain—one of the city’s worst tolls in recent memory.

In the geography of climate risk, some places are more vulnerable than others, and coastal megacities like Mumbai face the combined threat of rising sea levels and extreme weather events. As their populations expand—by 2050, most of the world’s people will live in urban areas—the paving over of permeable soil for houses and roads further increases the risk of flooding.

Like the rest of India, Mumbai is no stranger to what headline writers like to call “monsoon fury.” The city receives an average of about 94 inches of rain annually, more than double New York’s rainfall, and most of it arrives during the four-month rainy season. For years, the city and its residents have met the monsoon with precautionary measures including the clearing of municipal drains and the plastering of leaky roofs.

Those measures have never been quite enough: The season has long been marked by disruptions in train services, upticks in water-borne diseases, and occasional landslides and building collapses. Mumbaikars have tolerated these hazards in exchange for the economic opportunity offered by India’s commercial capital. People here are known for getting back to work quickly after a disaster, whether the disaster is a terrorist strike or a deluge.

But climate change could stretch Mumbai’s fortitude to its limits. Severe flooding used to occur once every few years. Now, intense-rainfall