Drowning in Delusion: Why Our Cities Compare Themselves to Venice When They Can’t Even Drain Water
The moment the first monsoon cloud rumble over the Gangetic plains, an old, tired ritual begins. Water invades our streets, our homes, our parking lots. And with equal predictability, social media lights up with a peculiar comparison: “Look, Ghaziabad has become Venice!” or “Welcome to the Venice of Noida.” As if a drowned underpass and a submerged scooter were evidence of a metamorphosis into a romantic lagoon city. But pause. Is this praise for Ghaziabad, or a casual, unthinking insult to a city that has survived fourteen centuries with engineering that still holds? This annual metaphor is not just lazy journalism—it is a symptom of a deep civic decay that our rulers have normalised, and we have compliantly accepted. Every monsoon, our leaders return to their pre‑rain promises of turning cities into Paris, London, or Singapore. Yet by the first downpour, we are forced to gaze at a dirty puddle and call it Venice. The gap between rhetoric and reality is not just a failure of drainage; it is a monument to systemic corruption, voter apathy, and an administrative class that has perfected the art of pretending.
The Venice Mirage: A Medieval City That Outlives Our Flyovers
Venice has a network of canals that function like highways. Its iconic Rialto Bridge has stood since the 14th century, watched by millions of tourists who cross it without fear of collapse. Now imagine, for a moment, if Venice were located in India. Every single one of those canal bridges would have been torn down and rebuilt at least three times by now, each reconstruction giving birth to a fresh scam. The buildings beside the Grand Canal would have been bulldozed for a “central vista” project. The gondolas would have been outsourced to a crony contractor who would deliver fibreglass tubs that sink. Venice, as a living city, would not have survived even a single term of our municipal governance. Yet here, after every rainstorm, we drag its name into our mess as a punchline. We never bother to learn what actually happens in Venice during acqua alta—the high tides that flood St. Mark’s Square. The Venetians have elevated walkways, real‑time tide alerts, and a billion‑euro flood barrier system called MOSE. They don’t post WhatsApp forwards saying “Venice turned into Ghaziabad.” They just get on with resilient, expensive, and publicly‑audited infrastructure—something our elected representatives have no intention of delivering.
“Venice, if it were in India, would have its canals encroached, its bridges auctioned, and its name used to shield incompetence. It survives because it was built before our breed of contractors was born.”
The Propaganda of Paris: How Our Cities Were Sold a Dream They Never Bought
The pre‑election stump speech is a genre of its own. Every neta, from municipal corporator to Prime Minister, promises that your city will soon rival Paris. Beautiful footpaths, gleaming metro stations, world‑class sewerage. The reality, however, is a Paris that exists only in PowerPoints submitted to the Smart City Mission. According to a 2022 CAG audit, of the 100 cities chosen under the Smart City Mission, barely 45% of the funds had been utilised by the extended deadline, and even completed projects often existed only on dashboards. The Parisian dream quickly curdles when the first monsoon hits. The smart poles become electrocution hazards. The command‑and‑control centres turn into rooms where officials watch live feeds of citizens wading through chest‑deep water, helpless. Yet the same politicians who inaugurated those smart poles stand for re‑election, and the same voters who dodged potholes on the way to the booth press the button again. It is a cycle so perfect that the corruption‑industrial complex has no reason to break it.
The Missing Link and Other Monuments to Corruption
Take the Mumbai‑Pune “missing link” project—a crucial expressway segment meant to reduce travel time between two of India’s economic powerhouses. The design came from Canada. The cables were sourced from Malaysia. Cable testing was done in Austria. Wind tunnel tests in Denmark. Nations lent their expertise, and Indian contractors executed the work. The result? A single monsoon was enough to trigger a landslide on the tunnel, leak water like a sieve, and shut down the link. As reported in The Indian Express, the very first heavy rain of 2023 caused a landslip and water seepage that betrayed the international collaboration. When you assemble a multinational engineering dream and it fails like a mud house, the problem is not materials—it is what happens between the sanction letter and the cement mixer. Bribes, substandard inputs, and the complete absence of accountability. This is not an aberration. It is the template for every flyover, every subway, every revived riverfront project. We import technology from the best, and then sprinkle a generous dose of Indian jugaad—which, in official parlance, means cutting costs by making kickbacks invisible.
Mumbai’s Silent Drowning: The Arrogance of Not Comparing
There is one peculiar, and almost admirable, trait about Mumbai during the monsoon. The city that drowns year after year, that loses lives to open manholes, that watches its lifeline local trains stop for hours—this city never compares itself to Venice or Ghaziabad. It does not joke about becoming Atlantis. Mumbai, in its waterlogged arrogance, refuses to be lumped with other drowning cities. Maybe it’s the self‑image of a maximum city that believes its water is somehow different, more tragic, more cinematic. Or maybe it’s a survival tactic: if you don’t compare, you don’t have to demand. The city simply goes silent, endures, and then waits for the next season. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, one of the richest urban bodies in Asia, collects thousands of crores in property tax yet cannot ensure that a receding tide doesn’t turn a street into a swimming pool. And the citizenry, trained by decades of this routine, has internalised that silence is the price of living in the dream metropolis.
This silence is a political gift to the administration. When the people stop making noise, the scandal becomes ambient. No one holds a press conference to ask why the Mithi river, after so many clean‑up drives, still overflows. No one questions why a new coastal road is built on reclaimed land while the existing drainage collapses. The city’s elite complain only about the resale value of their sea‑facing flats, not about the slums that get washed away. So, the monsoon becomes an event to be filmed, not fought. That is the real tragedy: not water on the roads, but a people who have stopped expecting dry roads.
Data Table: The Smart City Scam – Promises vs. Reality
| Parameter | Promise / Vision | Reality |
|---|---|---|
| Number of cities | 100 Smart Cities with world‑class infrastructure by 2023 | Mission extended multiple times; only 5,924 projects completed of 7,934 planned, many only on paper. |
| Budget utilisation | Rs 2,05,018 crore total outlay, fully utilised with impact | Actual expenditure around 45% of funds; significant sums parked in bank accounts earning interest. |
| Storm water drainage | 24x7 storm water pumping, zero waterlogging | In 2022 and 2023, almost all Smart Cities faced severe waterlogging; no city had functional integrated drainage. |
| Iconic infrastructure | Landmark bridges, smart roads, command centres | Multiple bridge collapses (e.g., Mumbai‑Pune missing link, flyovers in Varanasi, FOB in Mumbai); command centres mainly used for photo ops. |
| Citizen participation | Active citizen engagement through digital platforms | App‑based complaints often auto‑closed without resolution; no real grievance redressal mechanism. |
The Media’s Role: How Venice Became a Comedic Crutch
A significant part of the problem lies in the newsrooms. Every monsoon, television channels rush to find the most viral visuals of waterlogged streets and then anchor their packages with a smirk: “Ghaziabad is now Venice!” This is not clever; it is a betrayal of journalism. Calling a toxic, sewage‑laced pool of water “Venice” trivialises the misery of those who have to wade through it to reach a hospital, an exam hall, or a daily wage job. It reduces a systemic failure to a comedy reel. Venice is a city that has fought for its survival against water with architecture, science, and civic will. Our cities drown because of a complete absence of the same. The media, instead of exposing the nexus between corrupt contractors and municipal engineers, chooses to play with words. It is easier to do a cutaway to a guy rowing a makeshift boat and laugh than to ask the mayor why the drain cleaning budget vanished. The news anchors who perform this ritual are not just lazy; they are co‑conspirators in normalising a disaster.
Public Complicity: The Voters Who Forgive Everything
And then, there is us. The people who wake up to a flooded living room, curse for five minutes, and then upload a video with a laughing emoji. The same people who will, months later, vote for the very same municipal councillor because he “got the street lights fixed”—never mind that the street lights were installed only after the previous ones were stolen. The power of the vote is immense, and in India, it is consistently misused. We have normalised potholes, waterlogging, and collapsing infrastructure as acts of nature, not acts of criminal negligence. We have accepted that every monsoon will bring the same photographs, the same struggles, the same promises. By doing so, we have given a lifetime licence to the corrupt system. The leaders know that roads will wash away, and people will still reach the polling booth through knee‑deep water—the indelible ink will mark their fingers even if their shoes are ruined. There is a certain sadomasochism in this relationship. As long as the water recedes eventually, the forgiveness is immediate. And so, the cycle perpetuates, more vicious with every monsoon.
The River at Your Doorstep: A Dark Gift of the Rain
Perhaps the only honest thing the monsoon does is bring the river to your doorstep. We have systematically murdered our rivers—encroached, filled with trash, turned into drains. The monsoon, in its own way, forces us to remember that a river once flowed here. The water that accumulates on the road is a distilled sample of the river we buried under concrete. So the next time you see a “river” outside your gate, don’t call it Venice. Call it the ghost of the river we killed. Let it remind you that you paid taxes for a city that respects neither water nor its citizens. Stand in that puddle and feel what a river must have felt before we choked it. Maybe then you’ll find the anger to ask a difficult question. Or maybe you’ll just book a cab, pull up your trousers, and walk on—because that’s what smart city dwellers do.
Direct Criticisms
- To the Prime Minister and your government: You promised “Acche Din” and delivered only acche potholes. Your Smart City Mission was a smart scheme to funnel public money into private hands. Every collapsed bridge is a personal indictment of your administration’s corruption.
- To the Union Urban Development Ministry: Your dashboards are filled with photoshopped before‑after images, not real drainage. You celebrate token projects while millions wade through filth. Stop calling it a mission when it’s a racket.
- To the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and every municipal commissioner: You collect some of the highest property taxes in the country. Your silence during the floods is a confession. You are not helpless; you are complicit in trading lives for contracts.
- To the media anchors who use the “Venice of Ghaziabad” line: You are insulting a World Heritage city and trivialising human suffering. Your metaphors mask the rot. Do your job—investigate the tendering process, not the whimsical comparisons.
- To the voters of India: You have become so used to broken roads that you share memes while your neighbour loses a home. You re‑elect the same corrupt netas because they gave you a few freebies. Your vote is a weapon you keep handing to the people who hurt you. Stop complaining and start voting for accountability, not for a waterlogged selfie.
- To the contractor‑politician nexus: You have turned infrastructure into a death warrant. Your substandard materials kill people. Yet you walk free because you have perfected the art of the cut‑money. The blood on your hands is now mixed with rainwater.
- To everyone who thinks Venice is a funny reference: It is a city that built flood barriers., while we couldn’t build a single storm‑water drain. Show some shame. Don’t drag a 1,600‑year‑old city into the sewer we’ve created.
— this much.
