Rethinking Disasters: Investigating the Role of Identity and Infrastructure Planning in Experiences of Disasters in India’s Cities

Urban flooding presents an urgent threat to most megacities, especially in India, where even with investments in stormwater drainage and resilience planning, annual floods disproportionately affect marginalized communities. An entrenched view of disasters and risk as extraordinary events has shaped disaster management approaches, both globally and in India, focusing on ‘extreme events’ (Nixon, 2011; Gaillard, 2018; Goh, 2021). However, recurring urban floods are not extreme events but rather ‘everyday disasters’, which regularly devastate marginalized and informal communities. Current disaster management practices focus on spectacular investments in large-scale infrastructures without addressing exclusionary urbanization patterns underlying uneven disaster experiences. To address the root causes of cyclical urban flooding that threaten informal settlements, it is crucial to rethink planning and disaster management frameworks.

Residents in informal settlements negotiate daily with lower-level state actors, referred to as the “everyday state” (Ranganathan and Balazs, 2015), to access basic infrastructures such as water, sanitation, and electricity. These negotiations are crucial for improving resilience against environmental risks like flooding and real estate developments, which dispossess communities and exacerbate flood risks by encroaching on wetlands and watercourses. While research shows that locally embedded, everyday politics can subvert mega infrastructure projects and challenge global capital (Benjamin, 2008), it remains unclear how these negotiations can improve living conditions or influence urban planning to mitigate flooding.

Furthermore, residents’ intersecting identities – such as caste, gender, class and religion – play a significant role in shaping their interactions with the everyday state, influencing access to essential services and resources. Drawing on case studies from informal settlements in Patna, India, this paper seeks to reframe the understanding of disasters and risk by focusing on the everyday experiences of marginalized communities. Additionally, the paper considers how grassroots-level citizen planning practices might construct alternative, inclusive versions of environmentally just urbanization that reduce disaster risks.