In 2015, Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, was hit with floods that had devastating impacts. The Indian National Disaster Response Force described the floods as the worst experienced by the city in over a century. The city was submerged in eleven inches of rain, thirty-four times the daily average. Three hundred people died and millions more lost access to food and clean water. The immediate health impacts were disastrous, with residents suffering from hypothermia, diarrheal diseases, and hepatitis. Community residents did not have the means to pump water out of their homes or move into hotels. Existing inadequate sanitation infrastructure and overcrowding in low-income riverbank communities facilitated the spread of various diseases, such as leptospirosis, which is transmitted by direct contact with contaminated water. In the long term, impacted residents struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and an increase in substance use, largely due to the significant loss of life and property.
Chennai is a flood-prone area that is mostly occupied by marginalized communities. This marginalization is shaped by income and systemic social hierarchies, such as caste. Chennai provides more affordable housing and proximity to informal-sector employment, such as domestic services. Jobs in the formal sector, which offer greater upward economic mobility, favor candidates from higher castes. This geographic isolation of marginalized communities is often associated with neoliberal urban planning, which can limit consideration of low-income residents in disaster recovery. Neoliberalism advances capitalist agendas by promoting economic growth and privatization, often sidelining social welfare and equitable access to public resources. In 1991, in response to a severe balance-of-payments crisis, India’s Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh launched a liberalization program to accelerate privatization and globalization. Reforms included elimination of import tariffs and the removal of licensing requirements for various industries. While these changes spurred significant economic growth, they are also associated with economic inequities. The global market favors skilled labor and primarily benefits the formal sector, leaving informal laborers behind.
Community governance offers an alternative approach to market-oriented models. Some governance frameworks emphasize responsibilization, which shifts accountability for societal inequities from the government to individual actors without providing adequate resources to address inequity. This emphasis on individual responsibility is closely tied to privatization, where private entities, rather than the government, control the allocation of public goods and services. On the other hand, community governance promotes shared control over resources and collective decision-making rather than private market allocation. The governance of marginalized communities must center solidarity and social needs rather than individualism and market supremacy.
In response to the floods, Tamil Nadu spent 200 crore—equivalent to over 22 million United States dollars—on flood mitigation efforts. They constructed channels for excess rainwater and removed silt from major waterbodies to prepare for the monsoon season in late fall, which accounts for nearly sixty percent of annual rainfall in coastal districts like Chennai. Chennai’s flood mitigation efforts included government officials from the Chennai River Restoration Trust evicting nearly 60,000 low-income families who live along the waterbodies, demolishing their homes and forcing them to relocate to peripheral areas of the city. These families are forced to live in resettlement colonies in rural, low-lying, and flood-prone areas that have contaminated water, poor sanitation, and little access to healthcare. One of these colonies is Perumbakkam.
Perumbakkam, built on flood-prone marshlands, has faced flooding almost every year over the last decade. These floods have increased the risk of drowning, electrocution, and hypothermia, and Perumbakkam only has two health centers to serve over twenty thousand people. As poor quality water increases the risk of skin infections, residents must seek care from unqualified health staff, even in emergency situations due to lack of ambulatory services. Evidence suggests that this response to the floods has intensified existing income and health inequities.
The eviction of low-income families functioned as a form of slum clearance, aimed at replacing overcrowded, unsanitary neighborhoods with new developments. The government claimed that its goal was to restore the ecological function of the wetlands by fostering local flora and fauna, so the region can serve as a buffer against future floods. Yet, Tamil Nadu has permitted the construction of various office buildings, hotels, and luxury residential complexes along the rivers. Environmentalists have criticized Chennai’s river restoration efforts as only a pretext for displacing low-income communities.
Redevelopment coincides with high commercial value of the land and has been justified as disaster risk reduction. Unfortunately, similar patterns can be seen throughout environmental disaster response globally. In March 2024, following the deadly Maui wildfires, survivors received calls from investors attempting to buy their demolished homes for profit-driven redevelopment and tourism. Local residents had only just lost their homes, jobs, and community members and were unable to immediately afford rebuilding costs and mortgages. This mirrors the evictions in Chennai, where land redevelopment limits the ability of affected communities to remain in their homes.
Chennai must adopt a health equity-centered approach to disaster response that prioritizes community governance, which can offer a critical roadmap for reimagining flood response in the city. The government currently employs a top-down approach to decision-making, in which an administrative body outside the community dictates next steps to disaster response. Their flood response was devised and approved by the National Disaster Management Authority, an agency headed by the Prime Minister of India and composed of environmentalists and former senior armed forces officials, rather than the low-income residents continually displaced by disaster. This top-down approach did not sufficiently prioritize community safety and return. The National Disaster Management Authority does not adequately communicate with evicted communities. Many families did not receive proper notice of eviction, which is legally required to be in writing, and were instead only verbally informed by engineers hired to demolish their riverside homes. Following eviction, families slept in parking spaces, as developments in the resettlement sites were not ready for occupation. The new sites often lacked facilities for the disabled or elderly, with only narrow staircases and no elevators. Forcibly evicted families were uninvolved in decision-making and reported unmet basic needs, such as access to food.
A community governance model would have allowed communities who are disproportionately impacted by natural disasters to exercise control over the city’s response. This model empowers communities to participate in local government, such as through citizen advisory boards, to shape how the city responds to natural disasters. It is a bottom-up approach to natural disaster recovery, in which communities help craft solutions that are tailored to local problems. These opportunities to participate in municipal decisions do not constitute a shift in power, since the government typically retains final authority. However, through policy change, city agencies could be required to obtain approval from community-led bodies before approving disaster response policies, strengthening citizen influence over decisions.
Chennai residents are eager to help shape disaster response efforts. In September 2025, the Greater Chennai Corporation, responsible for administering government policies, began training riverside residents to be first responders during natural disasters, teaching them to use boats and ropes to rescue their neighbors during floods. When community members were given the opportunity to be involved in disaster response, they took the chance to raise concerns about structural issues connected to the floods. During these trainings, residents raised long-standing problems, such as a lack of manpower at local sewage pumping stations, which were a part of the city’s flood mitigation plan and diverting large volumes of water away from residential areas. The National Disaster Management Authority should hold inclusive public meetings that are actively advertised to riverside families to facilitate the formation of community-led disaster committees. These self-managed groups can then identify local priorities and offer input on recovery efforts, building long-term resilience. For example, the groups can elect local coordinators to organize volunteer teams that will assess damage, identify homes that need urgent repairs, and build temporary shelters. Community members can utilize their firsthand knowledge of vulnerable regions and local resources to make timely decisions in times of need.
Community governance models have been successfully implemented in other cities. The Louisiana Recovery Authority, a governmental body charged with planning the state’s recovery after Hurricane Katrina, incorporated an organized citizen participation component. The Authority invited citizens to public meetings held as part of the Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance planning process over the ten years following the disaster. Citizens submitted their own zoning maps and played a key role in shaping the city’s new layout. For example, city officials had proposed transforming heavily damaged neighborhoods into “green spaces,” open-space areas reserved for natural vegetation. Like in Chennai, heavily damaged neighborhoods in New Orleans were predominantly low-income areas with substandard infrastructure, such as structurally deficient bridges ill-equipped to withstand natural disasters. Louisiana residents successfully advocated against bulldozing low-income neighborhoods, which would have displaced thousands of families. In response to this civic engagement, New Orleans implemented a Citizen Participation Plan, ensuring that future city projects are devised with citizen input; they also funded a permanent Office of Neighborhood Engagement within the mayor’s office, tasked with facilitating public participation in government decision-making. These institutional reforms demonstrate the powerful long-term effects of community governance.
Reimagining disaster response continues to be essential, especially as climate change results in more atmospheric moisture and drives erratic monsoon rainfall and more frequent flooding across India. Floods already impact more people worldwide than any other disaster, and scientists predict that the cost of flooding will rise by eleven billion dollars by 2050. The risk and intensity of damage is expected to increase in low-income, flood-prone settlements. Specifically, in Chennai, the likelihood of flooding is magnified by rapid urbanization, which converts natural water bodies into concrete roads and prevents rainwater from soaking into the ground. In 2023, the severe Cyclone Michaung brought over 20 inches of rainfall to Chennai, exceeding the levels seen during the 2015 floods. Once again, Chennai residents suffered from waterborne diseases, such as typhoid, and hospitals were largely inaccessible due to widespread waterlogging.
Chennai’s adoption of a community governance approach would strengthen flood recovery efforts and help prevent future climate-related disasters. Through citizen-led councils, communities can advocate for and collaborate with local governments on the protection of green spaces and renewable energy projects. These initiatives reduce carbon emissions and help prevent climate change. Furthermore, residents can take matters into their own hands through member-owned, democratically controlled energy cooperatives. Residents can pool resources to invest in renewable energy projects, such as solar farms, sharing in the profits and reinvesting surplus revenues in the local community. This shifts decision-making power and resource control to residents most impacted by natural disasters, which is key to addressing structural inequities that make marginalized groups, such as Chennai’s riverbank communities, vulnerable to climate-related disasters. Community governance models and their outcomes could inspire other flood-prone Indian cities, such as Mumbai and Kolkata, to follow suit. In this way, Chennai’s residents can create a national model for urban resilience.
Authored by Lavanya Sathyamurthy
Lavanya Sathyamurthy is a recent graduate of UCLA School of Law, where she specialized in Critical Race Studies, and is currently a Research Affiliate at the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy. She is interested in how community-driven solutions can uplift historically marginalized populations.
