Petitioner to urge court to expedite flood case

Mumbai: The downpour in Mumbai on Tuesday and the failure of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to accurately predict the rainfall and issue prior warning raises the question of absence of sufficient facilities like Doppler radar in the suburbs. Advocate Atal Dubey who has filed a public interest litigation regarding the same and the issue of BMC’s claims of Mumbai being rain ready falling flat has said that he will be requesting the Bombay high court on Thursday to take up the PIL for an urgent hearing to get the BMC to hand over a plot of land at Jogeshwari for installing a Doppler radar in the Mumbai suburbs. Incidentally, the IMD’s failure became more evident from the fact that its predictions of heavy showers on Wednesday turned out to be a damp squib.

Speaking about the PIL, Dubey said that while the court had directed the BMC and IMD to show urgency in expediting the process of setting up of the Doppler Radar on a plot of land in Jogeshwari that was jointly identified by both the authorities, there had been no compliance as the BMC had not handed over the plot to IMD. “The BMC had assured that the plot would be handed over to IMD but it has not been done yet. As a result, the Doppler radar was not installed and IMD could not give advance alerts to Mumbaikars regarding the heavy rains on Tuesday,” said Dubey.

He added that he would be requesting the court on Thursday to take up the matter urgently. “While the IMD has failed, the BMC is equally responsible for the Tuesday debacle as they failed to put in place a mechanism to deal with flooding.

The bench of Justice V M Kanade had observed that while IMD was responsible for alerting citizens, the BMC could not be exempted from the responsibility of getting the city rain ready so that scenes of 2005 and 2015 were not repeated,” said Dubey.

Incidentally, though IMD on Tuesday had announced that more heavy rains could be expected on Wednesday, their prediction left Mumbaikars amused as the rain gods decided to spare the city and there was hardly any rain with the exception of a few showers in the morning. Based on the IMD predictions, the state had announced a holiday for schools, colleges and private and public offices too.

Ajay Kumar, director Regional Meteorological Centre, Mumbai was unavailable for comment.