On the night of 23rd September 2025, from the unearthly hour of midnight till the first light of dawn, Kolkata was a city held hostage. The skies cracked open with a fury not seen in decades, hurling down 280 millimetres of rain across six hours. Streets disappeared under water, neighbourhoods became islands, and the city that once dreamt of becoming another London was instead reduced to a tragic Venice without gondolas or romance. The monsoon, which in Bengal is often celebrated for its lyricism, its poetry, and its life-giving rains, turned into a destructive tide that washed away all illusions of preparedness.
Those who had lived through the great flood of 1978 whispered that this was worse. The numbers backed them, intensity, speed, and sheer helplessness. Even as raindrops pelted against shutters and windows, soaking curtains and seeping into walls, panic spread faster than the floodwaters. Roads were no longer roads but rivers of muck and swirling debris. Homes, which are meant to be sanctuaries, were violated by water, creeping first across courtyards, then into verandahs, and finally climbing over thresholds into bedrooms and kitchens. The ground floor of our own house in New Alipore was knee-deep in water. Outside, the streets had disappeared entirely, submerged waist-deep. Dogs paddled, cycle-rickshaws tilted, and garbage bins floated like macabre boats. Kolkata was drowning, and with it drowned all pretence of urban resilience.
Reports came in from across the city—Lake Gardens, Behala, Garia, Salt Lake, Ultadanga—everywhere the same sight, everywhere the same cry of despair. In many homes, furniture was ruined, refrigerators and washing machines destroyed, and children’s books and schoolbags reduced to pulp. For the elderly and the sick, the situation was worse than an ordeal. One could not step out for medicines, ambulances could not enter clogged streets, and dialysis patients had no access to hospitals. And yet, what was even more horrifying than the rain was the indifference that followed.
The role of governance, ideally, is to stand as the first responder, the protector when citizens face calamity. But in this crisis, the state government and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation stood exposed, their callousness seeping through every bureaucratic crack. The pumps that were supposed to drain water did not function on time. The electric boxes that should have been sealed before the monsoon lay open, waiting like death traps. By dawn, the city had already counted its first losses. Nine lives were claimed by electrocution in Kolkata, two more elsewhere in Bengal. Young boys on their way to buy milk, a father trying to wade back to his family, a worker who left for duty at dawn—all killed not by rain but by criminal negligence.
The families left behind gave voices to grief that words can scarcely hold. A mother in Topsia cried hoarse as she spoke of her seventeen-year-old son, who had stepped out to fetch bread for breakfast, never knowing that a submerged electric junction box awaited him. In Behala, the wife of a daily wage earner sat numb beside her husband’s lifeless body, whispering only one line again and again: “If the wires had been safe, he would still be alive.” In Salt Lake, the parents of another victim trembled as they narrated how their son’s phone call, cut off midway, was the last sound they heard before silence. These were not accidents; these were preventable deaths.
Instead of acknowledging failure, a theatre of blame unfolded. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee swiftly shifted responsibility to the power companies—CESC and DVC—claiming their negligence caused electrocutions. CESC, in turn, retorted that submerged electric boxes and wiring fell under the jurisdiction of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and the state’s civic management. What followed was not accountability but a battle of statements, a bureaucratic ping-pong match where ordinary citizens were little more than pawns.
Mamata announced compensation of two lakh rupees to each bereaved family and demanded job assurance for the victims’ kin from CESC. Her words, that no money could ever compensate for lives lost, were true—but they rang hollow when contrasted with decades of unfulfilled promises of drainage reform, safe wiring, and monsoon preparedness. For many, the assurance felt like an annual ritual, repeated every time disaster struck.
The response from CESC added another layer of torment. In what they claimed was a “safety measure,” power was cut off in several localities for extended periods. In our own neighbourhood, electricity disappeared at 10 a.m. on 23rd September and did not return until 11 a.m. on 24th September. Twenty-five hours without power meant refrigerators stinking with spoiled food, no means to charge mobile phones, no internet to reach out for help, and no fans in the stifling humidity. For households without stored water, taps ran dry, forcing people to depend on neighbours or vendors trudging through floodwaters. In some areas, residents queued with buckets and bottles at the few tankers that arrived. This was not just an inconvenience; it was a collapse of civic life in one of India’s oldest metropolitan cities.
The deeper question is: how did we arrive here in 2025? Kolkata, the cultural capital, the intellectual heart, a city that has survived colonial exploitation, Partition, famine, political turbulence, and economic decline, finds itself undone every monsoon. The script is painfully familiar. Civic bodies promise drainage upgrades, desilting of canals, modernisation of pumps, and waterproofing of electrical junctions. Funds are allocated, tenders floated, and inaugurations held with fanfare. But when the rain comes, so does the truth: drains remain clogged with plastic, pumps break down, and wires spark in flooded streets. The citizen is left abandoned, clutching at compensation after tragedy.
Urban planners have long warned of the ticking time bomb beneath Kolkata. Built on the soft alluvial plains of the Ganga delta, the city is naturally prone to waterlogging. But poor planning has magnified the risk. Lakes have been filled up to make way for housing complexes, wetlands that once absorbed excess rain have been encroached upon, and drainage canals have been narrowed by construction. Add to this the pressure of population, unregulated building, and climate change that fuels erratic weather, and the disaster becomes inevitable.
Yet inevitability does not mean helplessness. Other cities, facing similar geographical challenges, have found ways to adapt. Rotterdam, half of which lies below sea level, has invested in innovative water plazas and underground storage. Tokyo has built massive underground flood diversion tunnels. Even Mumbai, plagued by floods, has in recent years attempted to restore some of its natural nullahs and mangrove buffers. Kolkata, however, seems trapped in nostalgia, unable to marry its heritage with modern engineering.
To counter such mishaps, the city needs more than speeches—it needs structural, technological, and behavioural transformation. First, there must be an urgent overhaul of drainage systems. Pumps must be upgraded with real-time monitoring and backup power to function during extreme rain. Canals and stormwater drains must be desilted twice a year, not as a formality but with measurable transparency. Encroachments on wetlands and natural water retention zones must be reversed, however politically inconvenient that may be. Second, the electrical infrastructure must be made monsoon-proof. Every distribution box must be elevated above maximum flood levels, insulated, and checked before the rainy season. Independent audits should certify readiness, and failures should attract penal consequences. Third, communication with citizens must improve. Alerts, helplines, and app-based maps of flooded zones can prevent people from venturing into danger. Fourth, relief measures must be decentralised. Each ward must have its own emergency stock of clean water, dry food, boats, and medical kits, ready to be deployed within hours, not days. Fifth, accountability must be redefined. Politicians and corporations cannot hide behind each other; legal frameworks must ensure that the agency responsible for a lapse is penalised directly.
Beyond infrastructure, there is also the question of culture. Kolkata prides itself on community spirit, and indeed in the hours of darkness, neighbours rescued neighbours, young men carried children across waist-deep water, and families shared drinking water with those who had none. But the community cannot be a substitute for governance. It must be supported by institutional capacity. At the same time, citizens too must adopt responsibility: avoiding plastic dumping into drains, reporting faulty electric poles, and demanding transparency in civic budgets.
What remains etched most painfully from that night and its aftermath is not just the floodwater that swirled around our homes, nor the spoiled food in refrigerators, nor the endless hours without electricity. It is the voices of those who lost their loved ones, voices asking why in a city of poets, philosophers, and politicians, there is still no answer to rain. Kolkata is a city of resilience; it has survived colonial plunder, industrial decline, and political upheaval. But survival is not enough anymore. It deserves to live with dignity, with safety, and with the assurance that when the skies open up, its people will not be abandoned to death by electrocution in their own lanes.
September’s deluge was not merely a natural disaster. It was a civic failure, a mirror held up to decades of neglect. The water may have receded, but the questions remain, rippling across the city like reflections on a flooded street. Will this be remembered as another tragic chapter, filed away until the next monsoon? Or will it finally stir a reckoning, forcing those in power to realise that governance is not about blame games, but about protecting lives?
For those of us who spent that night listening to the rain pound the city, watching water seep into our homes, fumbling with dead phones in powerless rooms, and hearing the news of young lives lost to electric currents, the answer is urgent. The rains will come again, as they always have. Whether they arrive as a blessing or a curse depends on whether Kolkata chooses to learn from its drowned September.