Diamond in the rough: Pursuing disaster justice in Surat,India

An American studying environmental policy in India, I was always curious about people’s views on climate change. So one evening on my ride home from the office, I raised the topic with my auto-rickshaw driver. He was a chatty guy, bearded, with black spectacles and a navy blue turban. He had been keen on identifying for me the many troubles a man like him endures on the subcontinent. “Too many people!” he shouted, his voice competing with the cab’s rattling frame and the bleats of oncoming horns. “Too much traffic!”

We swerved around a landscaped rotary. I gripped my seat. A copse of date palms swung by, and then a billboard: “Enrich Delhi’s Green Legacy.” I took the bait. “So what do think about global warming?” I shouted.

We slowed to a stop behind a row of cars and two-wheelers waiting at the light. He cut the motor. A small boy pranced into the stalled traffic and began turning cartwheels in hopes of a small remuneration.

“Yes, I know about that,” the driver said. “Too much warming. Too much heat.”

“But do you worry about it?”

“Me—no.” He fired the engine and frowned slightly. “You know, India has too much noise!” he shouted. “And too many dogs! Too much everything.”

When there is a lot on your mind, it is hard to focus. And where climate change is concerned, India has a lot on its mind. Perhaps no country in the world is as vulnerable on so many fronts to climate change as India. With 7000 kilometers of coastline, the vast Himalayan glaciers, and nearly 70 million hectares of forests, India is especially vulnerable to a climate trending toward warmer temperatures, erratic precipitation, higher seas, and swifter storms. Then there are India’s megacities, where all of these trends conspire to threaten public health and safety on a grand scale—portending heat waves, drought, thicker smog layers, coastal storms, and blown-out sewer systems. These problems will surely grow as rural populations displaced by negative climate effects move to the cities, overwhelming critical services related to health, transportation, housing, energy, and water. When experts rank countries in terms of population centers most exposed to sea level rise or extreme weather, India is always at the top of the list. ¹ India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change, released in 2008, charges state and local governments with preparing for these risks, but progress is uneven and slow. Plus, the country’s widespread poverty and social inequality raise questions of about how evenly the benefits of climate action can be spread across all sectors of society.

Still, my travels on the subcontinent revealed important glints of hope, cities thrown on the ropes by crazier monsoons or climbing temperatures, but vigorously and effectively fighting back. One is Surat—India’s bustling, no-nonsense city, near the Arabian Sea. Known as the “Diamond Capital of the World,” Surat is also considered a relative success story among large Asian cities committed to climate resilience (Kernaghan and Da Silva, 2013). Although not poor by Indian standards, Surat remains a place where the average wage is US$4 per day and slums dominate the urban core. If it were possible to reduce disaster risk—to build resilience—for vulnerable populations there, perhaps the feat could be replicated. So I paid a visit. I spoke with city officials, business leaders, and public health experts. I perused the aeration basins of a water treatment plant, climbed the floodgates of a major river embankment, and weaved my way through a township built to replace flood-prone slums. I even toured a state-of-the-art diamond-polishing facility that turns out to be very relevant to this climate story.

In sum, Surat is making some impressive progress in the areas of flood control, public health, and public housing that other cities in the developing world can learn from. But as the city becomes more resilient to climatic change, the toughest challenge will be making sure that the city’s socially disadvantaged classes benefit enough so that they too can survive and thrive in a world of swelling catastrophic risk. Reaching that goal—which I call “disaster justice”—requires a model of resilience that addresses community hazard in terms of both geophysical vulnerability and socioeconomic vulnerability. And it requires a commitment to broad, transformative change on both fronts. Surat’s leaders and advocates appear to have embraced the general model. Whether they can deliver on the transformative change is a question left outstanding.

Methodology

This piece uses insights from the field of disaster law and policy to assess Surat’s progress toward “disaster justice,” a concept I and others have developed to describe the fair treatment of all people in policies relevant to catastrophic hazard (Farber et al., 2015; Verchick, 2010, 2012, 2018). The notion implies an inclusive decision-making process, free of discrimination, that pays attention to risks disproportionately imposed on socially disadvantaged populations. The case study of Surat focuses on a suite of climate resilience initiatives that the city designed and implemented in its role as a pilot city for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCRN) between 2009 and 2014.

My examination of Surat’s efforts draws from nine months of fieldwork I conducted in India in 2012 as a Fulbright-Nehru Research Scholar. At that time, the Surat Climate Change Trust had just begun operating, and the city’s early warning system for Ukai and local floods was being designed and implemented. Most of the fieldwork I rely on here took place in the city of Surat, Hazira (located within the broader Surat District), and Ahmedabad, where the consulting organization TARU Leading Edge (India’s ACCRN coordinator) maintains a Gujarat office. To a lesser extent, I draw from fieldwork conducted in Gorakhpur (another ACCRN pilot city), Mumbai, and New Delhi (where I met with officials from India’s Ministry of the Environment, Forestry, and Climate Change; analysts from the Centre for Policy Research; and with officials from the U.S. Department of State). In Surat, Hazira, and Ahmedabad, I conducted 26 semistructured interviews with municipal officials, local business leaders, local farmers, community advocates, and consultants at TARU Leading Edge. I have since followed up with many of these interviewees by email and video conference call to update my knowledge of the projects described.

I also studied government documents, project reports, local news articles, and reports from research and policy institutions. My discussion of disaster and social vulnerability relies on scholarly work published in the fields of geography, political philosophy, and law. You have already noticed that I am trying to avoid the linguist brocades of traditional legal scholarship. I do that to tell a more absorbing story, to underline the importance of lived experience in policymaking, and to make the stakes as visible and immediate as I can.

Climate and disaster

To understand the Surati experience, we must first know the global context. Experts have long known that climate change stacks the deck against developing countries. For starters, these nations are mostly in the tropics, where they are exposed to cyclones, teased by variable rainfall and, in the words of eminent economist Nicholas Stern (2007: 94–95), “already too hot.” In addition, developing countries are least able to cope with sudden disasters of all kinds because of substandard infrastructure, poor emergency response, and insufficient medical services. Indeed, deaths from natural disaster are generally linked to a nation’s economic welfare and its degree of income inequality (Kahn, 2005: 271). Within a nation’s borders, the burden of inequality replicates. Thus, the heaviest burdens of disaster within a society are borne by those with the least power—those who, for whatever social and economic reasons, are more exposed, more susceptible, and less resilient when disaster strikes (Farber et al., 2015: 228–229; Verchick, 2010: 106–107). Catastrophe is bad for everyone, but it is especially bad for the weak and the marginalized.

Many disasters, including the Surati floods, are backlit by the realities of climate change. The topic thus overlaps with concerns of “climate justice,” another offshoot of the environmental justice movement that focuses on the disproportionate effect that climate change has on developing countries and marginalized groups (see Dietz and Garrelts, 2014). Zoom out once more, and we see that all these topics—disaster, environment, and climate—inhabit a wider landscape devoted to concerns for human rights, economic equity, and sustainable development, which we can loosely define as “social justice” (Capeheart and Milovanovic, 2007).

Diamond in the rough

Surat, a medium-sized Indian city of 4.5 million people, is a global center for textile production and diamond polishing (Bhat et al., 2013: 429). Eighty percent of the diamonds sold in jewelry shops around the world are shaped by Surati hands. Nearly every Indian has something in their wardrobe from Surat—which is what one would expect from a city whose clattering looms churn out 30 million meters of fabric a day. The city lies 250 kilometers north of Mumbai, near the Arabian Sea, in the western state of Gujarat. Its proximity to the Tapti River delta made it a historical center of trade between India and Persian Gulf nations. One of the fastest growing cities in the world, with nearly zero unemployment, Surat has become a beacon for global investment and job seekers. In addition to diamonds and saris, the region hosts a busy port and scores of industrial facilities. There is talk of IBM and Microsoft planting their flags too. By 2025, Surat is expected to nearly double in size, pushing the population beyond 7.5 million.

Set between a tropical sea and forested hills, Surat is also a flood magnet. In the last 100 years, the city has experienced 20 serious floods—at least three produced by emergency discharges from the upstream Ukai Dam. Lesser floods, caused by hard rains, occur more frequently. In 1994, one disastrous torrent was followed by a virulent plague. As if that is not enough, tidal surges moving up the mouth of the Tapti River threaten Surat from the opposite direction. Even on calm days, high tides push salt water into parts of the river relied on for drinking water.

All of these problems will be aggravated by climate change. Climate change is projected to increase severe rainfall in Surat and in the Tapti watershed, even as silting behind the Ukai Dam is reducing the facility’s holding capacity. Because of sea level rise, Surat is now experiencing some of its highest tides on record. Shorelines are eroding, exposing the foundations of multistory buildings to saltwater corrosion. New worries are cropping up too. Surat’s steamy terrain has always been a draw for disease-carrying mosquitoes, but experts warn that higher humidity and more frequent floods could lead to more outbreaks of malaria. Some fear a return of the nearly eradicated vector-borne malady, filariasis, which is responsible for “river blindness” and elephantiasis. More variability in rain patterns means that stronger episodes of flooding may be accompanied by stronger episodes of water scarcity. Hotter temperatures will lead to more heat stress and, for those who can afford it, an increase in air-conditioning units and the electricity that runs them.

Like other rapidly growing cities in India, Surat is crowded with hundreds of informal settlements, known commonly as “slums.” For the most part, settlement residents are recent migrants unable to afford more formal housing. Many slums are located along the tidal creeks, between the river embankments and other drainage lines. They thus face much higher risks of flooding, whether from the rain, the river, or the tides. In comparison to other Indian cities, slums in Surat have better access to necessities like electricity, drinking water, toilets, and storm water drainage. But many households lack even these. Just a cut above slums are what the city calls “low-income neighborhoods,” which suffer many of the same deficiencies. It is estimated that about a third of Surat’s population lives in either a slum or a low-income neighborhood. In the last decade, the government initiated several slum relocations to move people out of the flood plains. Indeed, the city has provided more than 30,000 permanent houses in safer locations to slum residents. But as we will see, the results are mixed, at best.

One reason that residents congregate in the floodplains near the city center is because that is where the jobs are. Another reason is that with record numbers of newcomers arriving every year, some neighborhoods are losing the institutional memory that keeps people away from the most dangerous areas. Andrew Rumbach, a planning expert from the United States, has studied this effect in the Darjeeling District of West Bengal. He argues that India’s midsized metropolises carry a special disaster burden because unlike the mega-cities of Kolkata or Mumbai, the smaller siblings must deal with a 21st century growth spurt that vastly outpaces a culture’s ability to adapt (Rumbach, 2016: 118). Add to that the comparatively smaller economies and political power of midsized cities, and their prospects for resilience decline. There is surely truth in this. But with an exceptional location for exports and national political ties, Surat has often punched above its weight.

Before becoming the “Diamond Capital,” Surat’s strength in textile manufacturing made it “the Manchester of India.” But there is another important industry in the region, 20 kilometers from the city limits but within the broader Surat District, which is based on heavy manufacturing and petrochemical production. The Hazira Industrial Area, optimistically called the “Golden Corridor,” follows National Highway 6 as it winds westward from Surat toward the Arabian Sea. Thirty years ago, the region lay undeveloped except for nine rural villages. But in 1985 the state of Gujarat designated the area, which was close to the coast and had easy access to natural gas, for industrial development under the state’s 1963 planning act (Mahadevia and Shah, 2010: 3). Following India’s trade liberalization policies of 1991, the Surat District has succeeded in attracting significant direct foreign investment in the oil and gas sectors. Buoyed by foreign investment, waves of migrant labor have flowed into the area, mainly in the construction sector. But wages are low and government services and support are harder to come by than in Surat City (Mahadevia and Shah, 2010: 3).

I arranged for a tour to the “Golden Corridor” by car, accompanied by two disaster risk experts: Anup Karanth and Mehul Petal, who at that time worked at a leading Indian consulting firm called Taru Leading Edge, specializing in resilience. (Karanth now serves as a senior specialist at the World Bank Group; Patel is a project manager at the Surat Climate Trust.) Barreling down the Highway 6, we pass facility after facility with all the accompanying flares, plumes, and steam clouds. We see names like Essar, Shell, Reliance, UltraTech Cement, and Gujarat State Petroleum. Most plants are surrounded by brick walls and concertina wire. Across the street, you can see lines of shanties made of all sorts of material: blue vinyl tarps, palm fronds, bicycle tires, corrugated metal, tree limbs, and canvas. Near the shoulder of the road, two women in saris are heaving picks into a muddy trench. I watch a snowy egret take flight, its golden slippers catching the morning sun.

“Twenty years ago,” says Patel, “you could not even walk through here. It was all forests, no facilities.” Now, he says, Hazira is one of the fastest growing industrial sites in Asia.

“It’s the craziest place on earth, to be very honest,” says Karanth.

It is also sinking. Indeed, when the region floods, as it does every few years, the shanties are washed away and all the factories shut down. “The whole area was submerged in 2006,” Petal says. By all accounts continued expansion in Hazira’s lower flood plain is expected to make matters worse. Not only do these facilities draw workers who then settle in flood plains. But the flow of water of their contaminated soils is then carried into the communities across the highway. While Surat City, as we will see, has made progress on many fronts in reducing disaster risk, the Hazira Industrial Area remains a problem without any apparent practical solution.

The geography of vulnerability

The high risk of disaster in Surat City and the Hazira Industrial Area is unequivocal. But to understand the nuance and properly address causes, we must take a brief dip into the academic literature. What do we mean, after all, when we say a community is at risk? We can think of disaster risk as a combination of physical vulnerability and social vulnerability. Physical vulnerability is about an area’s geographic exposure to bad events. This kind of vulnerability is often linked to geophysical characteristics like deltas (which are prone to flooding) or seismic fractures (which trigger quakes and tsunamis). But they are also a function of the built infrastructure—proximity to an aging dam, for instance, or a fertilizer plant prone to accidental explosion. Social vulnerability refers to the susceptibility of a population to the impacts of that hazard.

Studies in the United States show that on every point of the disaster timeline—from preparation to response to recovery—social vulnerability loads the dice (Haas et al., 1977: 176–177). Demographic characteristics that have been linked to disaster vulnerability in the United States and in a variety of other countries include race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, education, religion, and population density (Farber et al., 2015). Another social factor in disaster vulnerability includes access to government or community “networks” that provide emergency response, health care, insurance, and so on (Verchick, 2012: 42–46).

Physical and social vulnerabilities obviously interact. Sometimes a community’s physical environment is exploited or destroyed because residents are too powerless to do anything about it. And in some communities, poverty is closely linked to a lack of natural resources and impoverished physical surroundings. In this sense, all hazards might be described as “social” in the end.

In the 1990s, researchers in the United States began using census data and digital technology to “map” physical and social vulnerability. Their method, called “aggregate analysis,” sought to capture the hazard risk of a whole community by combining a series of variables related to physical and social vulnerability, from geography to climate, from income and education levels to race and age. The geographer Susan Cutter is a leader in the field of “vulnerability science.” Cutter et al. (2003: 254) used aggregate analysis techniques to develop a “social vulnerability index” to compare disaster risks in communities across the United States. Her work over three decades has informed researchers and policymakers around the world, including, as we will see, in Surat City.

But for now, I we can note that both kinds of vulnerabilities—physical and social—are on full display in the Surat District. The physical vulnerabilities in the city include torrential rains, sea-level rise, proximity to a flooding river, releases from the Ukai Dam, vector-borne illness, and more. In the Hazira Industrial Area, add to those the threat of industrial accidents (like explosions or toxic releases into the air) and the migration of toxic waters from industrial sites during floods. The social vulnerabilities include poverty, caste discrimination, religious bias, lack of education, and more. Of particular concern is that public services that exist in the urban areas of Surat City—such as medical care, access to safe drinking water, and garbage collection—do not exist in the more rural industrial corridor.

This way of seeing the world expands the scope of disaster policy beyond geophysical concerns to those that are economic, social, and political. It leads us to see the relationship between risk reduction and the broader concepts of equality and justice. Among academics and policy advocates, there has been recent debate about whether the term resilience accurately describes the proper objective for disaster risk reduction or climate change adaptation. Critics argue that resilience implies the ability to return to “business as usual”—if not a return to poorly built infrastructure (which no one supports publicly), at least a return to the same basic political and economic structures, which, of course, preserve all the preexisting asymmetries of power, wealth, and voice (Brown, 2014; Leach, 2008). To be useful, resilience must mean more than that. This is so for two reasons. First, anything else would be unjust. (More on this shortly.) Second, as a very practical matter, the scholarship of Cutter and other disaster policy experts shows that you cannot really reduce disaster risk without also reducing social vulnerability. Just as any resilience effort worth its salt must concentrate on maintaining strong dams and bridges, so must it also concentrate on providing the means for average people to build stable and autonomous lives. Resilience, in its fuller aspect, soars above whatever is narrow, remedial, or incremental. It is multidimensional and transformative.

Squatters, shanties, and justice

The problem, of course, is that there is a lot of transforming to do. Without laboring India’s social challenges, a brief look at the demographics of the region’s informal settlements tells a sobering story.

I have noted that the large majority of settlement residents are migrants. This is because the lack of employment and community ties makes it much harder to find affordable shelter. Generally, poor migrants looking for work in farms or factories establish their first abode on “any footpath, railway track side, vacant industrial land or any vacant land outside the city limit which they can squat easily upon” (Mahadevia and Shah, 2010). In the Surat District, that often means somewhere in the Hazira Industrial Area. With time, rural “squatters” become more familiar with the city, save some money, and graduate to rented shanties in urban slums. Eventually, these residents might build on to their existing structure or upgrade to one of the small number of better appointed dwellings within the settlement. Some Indians see the slum residents as a drain on public resources. But the truth is the city could hardly survive without them, for they contribute “immensely” to the lucrative diamond and textile industries (Mahadevia and Shah, 2010: 5).

For this reason, the Surat Municipal Corporation (with the help of nongovernmental organizations) has in recent years brought water lines, sanitation services, street lights, and medical aid to many informal settlements. Under the Bombay Provincial Municipal Corporations Act, which governs the Surat Municipal Corporation, the municipality is allowed to earmark up to 10% of its annual income (with some exceptions) for providing such services in settlements that predominantly house members of disadvantaged castes, tribes, or other social groups. Thus from 1992 to 2005, the number of slum households with private water taps jumped from 19 to 72%, while the number of households with individual toilets rose from 21 to 35%. Drainage facilities are available for at least 80% of households. As of 2005, 45% of slum households were connected to the electricity grid (Mahadevia and Shah, 2010: 8–9). While these numbers are impressive when compared to other Indian cities, the general conditions are far from acceptable; researchers Darshini Mahadevia and Pooja Shah (2010: 7) call them, “pitiable.”

Of all slum residents in the Surat District, 81% are Hindu, 18% are Muslim, and a small minority are Buddhist. Only 11% belong to higher, or so-called forward, castes (as compared to 25–35% for the nation as a whole). The literacy rate in the slums hovers around 52% (compared to 83% in the city as a whole) and educational attainment is predictably low (Mahadevia and Shah, 2010: 23–24).

To see how these precarious living conditions contribute to disaster risk, consider Divaliben, a survivor of the city’s 2006 floods, whom Mahadevia and Shah interviewed for their 2010 examination of Surat’s slums. Divaliben is a 60-year-old woman who migrated to Surat with her husband more than 40 years ago. At the time of the flood, she lived in the Subhashnagar slum near the bank of the Tapti River, where thousands of households had existed for two decades.

Divalibhen [sic] sells mud toys, balloons, wooden swords, etc. to children. . . . At her age, in the hot summer, she feels dizzy and even faints some times. There is no old age security or pension for her. . . . In the 2006 floods, she lost her [hut] all her utensils, bedding and above all her identity proofs. All the slum dwellers had shifted to the bridge above for four days. In fact, everyone had lost their household belongings in the flood. Government threw down the food packets from the helicopter and they all survived on this food. . . . Amidst the crisis, government gave a compensation of Rs. 2,500 [less than US$35] from which she constructed a tent like structure from tarpaulin. As if all these problems were not enough, her [flooded] hut was demolished by the [Surat Municipal Corporation] after about 7-8 months [after] the flood. All other huts too were demolished and the whole slum was evicted. She now has neither shelter security nor food security, because in the process she has lost her ration card. (Mahadevia and Shah, 2010: 25)

I quote the passage at length to convey both the context and the pathos. Surely, such powerlessness, broadly shared, defeats a community’s disaster resilience. But is it a failure of the basic social contract? Is it, as I asserted above, unjust? Getting to the root of this question will help us understand what efforts Surat owes its residents and guide us in evaluating the city’s progress toward disaster justice.

What is justice, anyway? And how does the idea take shape in a world of wildly divergent wealth and services? Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, is famous for his work on social inequality. While he lives today in the United States, he is of Bengali descent, having grown up in a region that is now part of Bangladesh. He knows the subcontinent is on one end of the world’s economic barbell. ² And he knows there’s another barbell within the country itself. Sen’s research has added greatly to the field of development economics and helped transform the way the United Nations Development Programme now measures levels of poverty and inequality around the world. The crux of his analysis centers on human “capability,” a concept he first introduced at Stanford University’s Tanner Lecture on Human Values in 1979 (Sen, 1979). Put simply, capability is a measure of what people can actually do and what they can actually become.

According to Sen, society’s first goal is to promote the enjoyment of personal freedom. But freedom without the resources to make real choices and to experience real consequences is an empty shell. True freedom, Sen (1999) argues, demands that all persons have the real-life capabilities to “lead the kind of lives they value—and have reason to value” (178). The capabilities approach has influenced research in several fields, including economics, political theory, history, and law.

We can disagree about what a person’s bundle of capabilities must include. But at the very least all persons are entitled to such “elementary capabilities” as “being able to avoid such deprivations as starvation, undernourishment, escapable morbidity and premature mortality, as well as . . . being literate and numerate, enjoying political participation and uncensored speech and so on” (Sen, 1999: 36). The inclusion of democratic processes is vital. It is both an intrinsic value (it is a constituent of freedom) and a constructive means by which individuals can secure other aspects of freedom and set group norms for defining them.

Sen’s interests in development and human capability often lead him to the topic of natural disasters. In this subject, he is perhaps best known for his work on famines—events that can be triggered by droughts, storms, floods, and other phenomena. Disasters, after all, are one of the great threats to economic resilience in the developing world. And reducing a community’s risk (whether in a poor country or a rich one) strengthens a range of personal freedoms, most notably the freedoms from avoidable impoverishment, injury, and death. In his inquiries into famines and other “calamitous crises,” Sen’s campaign against injustice ultimately leads him to some of the same insights we have seen promoted by geographers and other experts in the social sciences. Two are particularly important.

First, like Susan Cutter and her colleagues, Sen emphasizes the connection between natural hazard and geographic, social, and economic circumstances. The drought or flood that precipitates a poor harvest also throws people out of work and drives down monthly income. Thus, “famines and other crises thrive on the basis of severe and sometimes suddenly increased inequality” (Sen, 1999: 187). Second, Sen stresses the importance of a community’s infrastructure—in its social, built, and natural forms. Sen is specifically aware of the importance of social networks and public health systems. Sen offers a third insight, which is sometimes mentioned in the social science literature, but to which he gives full voice in his moral deliberations: the paramount necessity of democratic values. For Sen, the project of disaster risk reduction is deeply linked to government transparency, political accountability, and the right to participate in administrative decision-making. Democracy, as noted earlier, is an inherent aspect of freedom. But it is also an important hedge against deprivation. At a minimum, we should agree that human freedom requires the capacity to avoid unnecessary property damage, injury, and death. In the face of disaster, human freedom requires resilience.

What happens when we join disaster’s social turn with a vision of injustice based on capability? The social turn teaches that government’s role is broader than it first appears. Building resilience, a job the government already accepts, is more than an exercise in steel and concrete. As the social science literature shows, reducing community risk entails not just good engineering, but also relieving the burdens of social vulnerability. The capability approach teaches that the job of building resilience—and thus the job of reducing social vulnerability—is more than a politician’s kind turn, it is the obligation of a free society. To fail to deliver on this obligation (to the best a government’s resources permit) is an injustice.

In this view, the plight of Divaliben, and thousands of others like her, must be seen as unjust insofar as the government had the knowledge and means to reduce risk beforehand (through planning, education, warnings, and so on) and to provide more generous opportunities for recovery. More importantly, the government had and continues to have the broader obligation to see that all residents have the practical means to avoid serious deprivation and participate in the political process.

Armed with these insights, it is time to take a closer look at Surat’s efforts to build resilience in the face of natural disaster and climate change. We will see how the city is approaching both the physical and social vulnerabilities that challenge its communities. We will measure its progress in terms of increasing freedom from deprivation and in terms of practical participation. We will also ask how such progress can be sustained, improved, and even replicated. The sectors we will focus on are flood control, public health, and public housing.

Flood control and city unity

In Surat, people still talk about the epic flood of 8 August 2006. In fact, you can still find “HFL 8.8.2006” scrawled on many of the city’s peeling walls, marking the “high flood level” that swamped the city that day. The 2006 flood was one of the worst in memory. Inundating more than three-quarters of the land area, it killed more than 150 people and stranded tens of thousands in their homes without food or electricity. Financial losses totaled more than US$3.5 billion (Karanth and Archer, 2014: 517).

The flood was almost certainly avoidable. Nearly 100 kilometers upstream from Surat, heavy rains were filling the massive reservoir behind the Ukai Dam to its structural limit. Rather than releasing the water in measured doses, the dam’s operators opened the flood gates all at once, submerging the city with almost no warning. The Gujarat state government characterized the deluge as a natural disaster. But a citizen’s committee found otherwise, attributing much of the flood damage to mismanagement at the dam (Chatterjee, 2015).

In the aftermath, everyone knew dam operations had to be improved and coordinated with downstream populations. But the reservoir—which holds more than nine billion cubic meters of water and is fed by a watershed encompassing three states—did more than collect storm drainage. It provided drinking water, irrigated farmland, and generated hydroelectric power. Because those uses sometimes conflict, stakeholders could not agree on how to manage them.

What happened next emerged from a confluence of perseverance, cooperation, and chance. Many of Surat’s most established organizations joined forces to broker a deal to reduce flood risk in the city. The coalition included Surat’s municipal government; the powerful Southern Gujarat Chamber of Commerce; and Taru Leading Edge, the firm with which Karanth and Petal were associated. In a fortunate turn, the Rockefeller Foundation supported the effort as part of its initiative to build climate resilience in Asian cities. The parties eventually developed the Surat Climate Change Trust, an entity representing a range of stakeholders and sanctioned by the national government. Its charge is addressing the challenges of urban development, natural disaster, and climate change (Surat Climate Change Trust, 2015). The Trust helped develop a comprehensive management and warning system for major floods.

Trust officials brought together politicians, business leaders, and community members to create a long-term policy for reservoir management and an emergency plan for times of crisis. Experts at Taru Leading Edge worked with the India Meteorological Department to improve storm forecasting, building in climate change projections as needed. Automatic weather stations were installed inland to forecast the impact of rainfall on water level at the Ukai Dam. Officials can now better anticipate heavy rains and can project the extent of flooding many hours or even days before an event.

Informing the public is the next step. And that too is an enterprise that has dramatically changed. In 2006, flood warnings came just a few hours before, blaring from loudspeakers roped to the tops of trucks and vans. Today citizens receive information two days beforehand by SMS, a city-supported smartphone app, or even Facebook. In addition to communications technology, the city relies heavily on innovations in digital mapping. Indeed, planners at Taru helped develop a disaster hazard map based on the concept Susan Cutter used in developing her “social vulnerability index” for U.S. counties.

For Surat’s version, planners used household interviews, hydrological data, and demographic information to create a scale of “vulnerability and capacity” with which to evaluate the city’s neighborhoods. The scale combines data on physical vulnerabilities like flood risk and sewer backups with social vulnerabilities, measured in terms of income, education, and social bonds. The highlighted risk in slums and low-income neighborhoods prompted several proposals, including a computer database of vulnerable households, stronger building codes in poor areas, and community banks where flood-prone households can protect valuable goods (Bhat et al., 2013: 11). City engineers have identified people in vulnerable neighborhoods who know how to swim or own boats. They have identified the rooftops on which people should gather. They know where the old-timers are—those who know how floodwaters move and how to survive them—and they know where the clueless newcomers are, too. Maps like these are the key to urban resilience in India, Karanth told me, because they tell the fuller story. “They take the physical parameters and the social parameters,” he said, “and they talk about power.”

In her book, The Resilience Dividend, Judith Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, praises the Surat Climate Change Trust, noting, in particular, strong leadership in the business community. “Today, in contrast to 2006,” Rodin (2014) writes,

the water management process involves decision makers at all levels. The involvement of private industry players is particularly important. If the lead up to a 2006 scenario were to happen today, those businesses could, in the worst-case scenario, ask for intervention from the highest level of political and administrative authorities—and would not be ignored. (236)

Susan Cutter and Anup Karanth show us how new information, properly framed, can not only illuminate what one sees, but reorient it. The 2006 flood was not just the product of rain and bad luck, but it was the product of malfeasance and social vulnerability. Still, knowledge alone does not change things. Motivation does. When Rodin emphasizes the role of “private industry players,” she is talking about the importance of commercial motive and financial resources. When Karanth underlines the power of “social parameters” he is acknowledging wealth, to be sure, but also the capacity of social support on all rungs on the economic ladder. Karanth had told me I could not fully understand Surat’s financial drive and community spirit without learning more about its most celebrated industry. So he set up a meeting, and I was soon on my way.

A LEED-Certified fortress of concrete and glass, encircled by simple gates and a manicured lawn, SKR’s diamond-finishing plant dominates the urban horizon. I arrive early, but I need not have. The security checks are swift and routine, and I am soon invited into an enormous atrium. Overhead, an electronic reader board welcomes me by name. Interpretive displays unwind along the perimeter, highlighting the company’s history and many philanthropic awards. But holding my eye is the lobby’s nearly endless sea of stone flooring, glinting in sunlight, occasionally interrupted by atolls of chrome tables and angular leather sofas. The top note is opulence. But in a country so starved for empty space—so crowded with scooters, ox carts, and pie dogs—SKR conveys a more determined message, one you could imagine stamped on the outside of the facility’s box-like structure: “First World Inside.”

A guide gives me a tour of the operations. All the spaces I see, from work rooms to back hallways, are well ordered and immaculate. Maintenance workers move silently about, dusting sconces, buffing floors, polishing chrome railings. In one lab, dozens of technicians study computer screens connected to glowing boxes resembling microwave ovens. With permission, I peek through the amber window of one box and watched as a laser cleaves a raw diamond within a few microns of its life.

In another, much larger room, scores of technicians sit at long tables beneath strong fluorescent lights. Using electric polishing wheels, they add reflective facets to each diamond and smooth out every rough edge. Each worker wears the same collared, cornflower shirt and, occasionally, a white surgical mask. I smile at one technician, and she pulls down her mask to chat briefly. She tells me that she and her family had worked at SKR for many years now. She shows me the diamond she is polishing and offers to let me hold it. I am nervous, but I cannot resist. She lifts the glittering stone with long tweezers and drops it into my cupped hand. I press the stone’s sharp edges into my palm, being careful not to slip and send it flying across the room.

“How much do you think a diamond like this is worth?” I ask. She rocks her head to one side.

“That one, I would say—forty thousand dollars.”

You might wonder how security works in a city like this, where the average per capita income is around US$4 per day. The answer is important to understanding not only Surat’s unique economy, but also its prospects for urban resilience. The secret, it turns out, is social cohesion. Surat’s diamond finishing business is heavily dependent on stable and trusting social networks. The gem and jewelry business, defined by cash transactions and portable assets, is notoriously vulnerable to cheats. For this reason, parties prefer to do business with people they have already worked with and expect to work with again. The ties are generational, and families develop strong relationships with one another. When a diamond is sold from a finisher to a dealer and then to an exporter, it is possible neither the gem nor the money will be transferred immediately. Instead, the transactions rely on credit underwritten by these social bonds.

Companies like SRK also cultivate trust and loyalty among their workers. Diamond finishing requires training and skill not available elsewhere in the country. To keep the city’s level of expertise high, diamond finishers pay their workers a good wage, subsidize their housing, and sometimes support family members. People in the community know who works for which company and keep tabs on what they are doing. When finished diamonds are transported to jewelers and exporters within the city, they travel not by armored truck, but often in the pockets of young boys hired to thread their way through bustling streets and narrow alleys. No one I spoke with saw anything remarkable about this (although some suggested a second boy might be hired to watch the first one). In an increasingly competitive marketplace, business leaders know that keeping their workforce intact means keeping their city resilient. Should the city shut down for too long, an industrial powerhouse like Mumbai could swoop in and eat their lunch.

SRK’s founder, Govind Dholakia, emphasizes the bonds of community when I meet him on the top floor in his spacious office with breathtaking views of the city. Wearing primly pressed trousers and a linen shirt, he is the picture of decorum. I thank him for agreeing to see me. He smiles and gestures toward a sitting area where a stainless steel tea set and several enameled bowls brimming with nuts and fruit await. “When you visit a Surati’s home, you meet the host.”

Dholakia founded SRK, also known as Shree Ramkrishna Export, in 1964, with a commitment to quality, technological innovation, and civic responsibility. Today SRK is India’s premier diamond manufacturing company, with four offices, two factories, and more than 5000 employees. SRK invests heavily in many philanthropic causes throughout India, including women’s empowerment, public health, and those affected by natural disasters. The company is known for its generous, even sometimes extravagant, staff benefits. In 2016, the firm reportedly dispatched 300 lucky employees and their families to the Himalayas on paid holiday (Times News Network, 2016).

When I ask how Surat was able to build and maintain its position as the world’s Diamond Capital, Dholakia answers simply, “city unity.” To elaborate, he believes that even the grandest aspirations are possible with the proper psychological commitment. Or in the translated words of his favorite Vedic verse, “The power of the mind is infinite.” When waters from the 2006 flood submerged the city along with his own home, Dholakia said he never doubted his city would rebound. As soon as the water receded, he and a team of 500 SRK employees slogged into the muddy streets, clearing debris and sweeping streets into the night.

Public health and a local champion

Flooding is bad. But the aftermath can be worse. Stagnant water and humidity provide the perfect conditions for the outbreak of mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria and dengue fever. Cramped housing and poor sanitation can lead to leptospirosis and worse. In 1994, a series of downpours flooded the lowlands and choked the sewers, leading to an outbreak of pneumonic plague. Unprecedented panic ensued, with a quarter of city residents fleeing the city to avoid quarantine and the region’s economy falling into a tailspin (Dutt et al., 2006: 755). Although the disease was quickly controlled, the reputation of city management took a severe hit. Its leaders vowed “never again.” S.R. Rao, Surat’s municipal commissioner at the time, overhauled garbage collection, street cleaning, and health standards in food stalls, and brought latrines and paved streets to the slums. In less than a decade, Surat was transformed from dirty, disease-ridden city to one of India’s finest examples of urban hygiene.

Dr Vikas Desai saw the transformation first hand. In 1994, she was a public health instructor in a medical college. “Back then it was a very filthy city,” she tells me. In the plague’s aftermath, disagreements erupted between private health practitioners and government agencies, which took years to heal. Desai and others worked hard to bring these sides together. Years later, she became a state administrator in the health department and is now the head of the Urban Health and Climate Resilience Centre, as well as a trustee of the Surat Climate Change Trust. She says public health in a city like Surat—prone to floods with so many living in poverty—requires sustained vigilance. Further, addressing public health is not just something you do in a disaster. “If you can do this in a crisis, you should be able to do it in normal times.”

To that end, the city government, unlike most Indian cities, maintains a fairly extensive network of 41 health centers and two hospitals, in addition to hundreds of other private facilities in the jurisdiction. The city also runs mobile medical clinics. In addition, the city employs an army of health surveillance workers trained to administer medicines, collect data, and notice outbreaks before they are seen at hospitals. Each day, nearly 500 of these specialists fan out into river bank slums, asking parents about their children’s fevers, looking for uncovered cisterns, and poking about waterlogged gardens.

Surat is fortunate to have both the financial resources and government competence to maintain such efforts. But Desai still worries that climate change could lead to a proliferation of mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria and dengue. She is also concerned that longer periods of extreme heat in the summer will become another major threat to public health. The Surat Climate Change Trust is already investigating solutions to this problem, from outfitting windows with bamboo shades to painting rooftops with reflective paint to cool a home’s interior space.

Safe housing (but that is all)

But Surat’s experience raises a cautionary note. One of the city’s most dramatic efforts to reduce flood risk involves the relocation of slums, many of which are located along tidal creeks, river banks, or drainage lines. Over the last decade, Surat moved tens of thousands of families from flood-prone slums to townships in safer parts of the city. When Divalibhen lost her home in the floods of 2006, 18% of the city’s population lived in slums. As of 2014, the proportion is 7% (News Brief, 2014). In the near future, the Surat Municipal Corporation is determined to push the number to zero (Bhatt, 2014).

There is a human cost to this relocation, since the developments are often located many kilometers away and lack the jobs and services found in the urban core. One morning I take an auto-rickshaw to an area in the northern part of the city called Kosad and visit a development named, rather inelegantly, “H1 Block.” The neighborhood is peaceful and organized, by urban Indian standards. A whitewashed block wall surrounds the perimeter, with ample entryways every few meters. Behind the wall are row upon row of four-story concrete buildings, each with two corrugated water tanks roosting on top. There are vendors selling snacks from pushcarts and a barber cutting a man’s hair beneath a yellow tarp he had rather ingeniously attached to the wall and cantilevered by way of a bamboo pole. One segment of the wall appears to have been rammed through, leaving a pile of rubble and a circular hole about five feet across. A couple of toddlers are climbing around on that. A slightly older boy is hanging from the top of the hole by one hand, attempting a pull-up.

Like many of Surat’s floodplain relocation developments, H1 Block is a project funded by the state and the national government through a broader urban renewal program aimed at providing urban infrastructure and better services to the poor. So it is rooted in both a human development framework and community resilience framework. The housing is need based and assigned by lottery. H1 Block contains 110 buildings with 5280 separate apartments. Each apartment has two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a toilet. Rent is about US$6 per month.

Everyone seems pleasant, but honestly, there is not much going on. A police officer assigned to the block tells me that, in fact, things there are quite sad. More than half the adults in H1 Block are unemployed, and domestic violence and alcoholism are serious concerns. A customer at the snack cart tells me that some residents have trouble adapting to multistory living, and there is no place to keep their livestock. “There is a cow who got fractured because it fell from the top floor, just straight down the staircase,” he says. “Cows are not designed to be carried down the staircase.”

The anecdote I cannot confirm, but a recently published study on relocation sites in Surat, including H1 Block, finds a disturbing “sense of alienation among slum dwellers, further leading to loss of standing in the community” (Gandhi and Bhatt, 2015: 1). Among common complaints are the separation from extended family (a product of the lottery system), insufficient space for large families (six or more), and—despite the rooftop storage tanks—insufficient water. But above all else, residents complain of having no work and no affordable way to reach the city center. Thus, many residents of these new developments appear to be moving back to the city and resettling (illegally) in the flood plains. Sen’s call for a life that is valued—and has reason to be valued—seems highly relevant here.

Why wisdom is like rainwater

In a relatively short time, Surat has accomplished a lot in terms of climate resilience and disaster justice. With the help of outside experts, the city has assessed the climatic risks in relation to flood management, energy, and public health. It is implementing a new early warning system for major floods and designing an inflatable dam to protect the river from saltwater intrusion. Much of this work has been accomplished through a flexible and relatively loose network of public officials, business people, and community members organized around one compelling goal: climate resilience. But that goal serves an array of interests. The political and business communities were concerned about trade and economic growth, which were threatened by downtown floods. The public health community, still haunted by its experience with the plague, was committed to cleaning the streets and delivering potable water. And everyone, most notably those in the poor and working classes, wanted housing that would not wash away with the next monsoon. Addressing climate impacts, it must be noted, was not anyone’s first priority. But when the Rockefeller Foundation announced its interest in funding projects pursuing that goal, city managers were savvy enough to jump at the chance. While not without their flaws, Surat’s efforts are considered one of the success stories of urban adaption projects in Asia. The improvements also make Surat more resilient in the face of the kinds of floods it would presumably face even without carbon-induced warming (although the line between the two is scientifically vague).

Integrating resilience and fairness into everyday governance requires effective networking and a solid legal framework—features I have likened in previous work to “rope lines” and “footholds” (Verchick and Hall, 2011). “Rope lines” describe the formal or informal relationships among public and private actors at various levels of jurisdictional boundaries (national, regional, local) and across given sectors (public health, agriculture, energy, and so on) (2204–2205). The relationships can be described as vertical (related to level of jurisdiction) or horizontal (related to sector). “Footholds” describe existing policies or laws that may be used to “anchor” new initiatives related to climate adaptation (2210–2211).

The climate resilience initiatives in Surat illustrate the importance of vertical rope lines. Developing a municipal warning system for river-based floods proved challenging because the events were triggered by planned releases from a dam in a neighboring state (Verchick and Hall, 2011: 2236–2237). Negotiating the plan took years and involved local leaders, state water management offices, and participation from India’s central government. Other adaptation efforts also relied on existing land-use authorities (“footholds”) to reconfigure street drainage and public health laws to support its efforts in protecting drinking water from saltwater intrusion. The flood plain relocation efforts were grounded in existing national initiatives aimed at urban renewal. All of this is overseen by a recently created municipal climate adaptation council—a horizontal “rope line,” whose participants include representatives from city government, local chamber of commerce, and public health advocates (Verchick and Hall, 2011: 2235).

Additional horizontal networking came about through experiences of “shared learning.” Shared learning emphasizes the role of local actors in complex adaptive systems. This is particularly important from the justice angle since fair outcomes require inclusive processes. By involving community members early in the process and actively facilitating planning and communication strategies, the method “promote[s] learning and co-production of knowledge; build[s] new formal and informal networks across scales and sectors; build[s] capacities of stakeholders for analysis and self-representation; and spark[s] innovative responses to problems” (Reed et al., 2013: 2). Sen might add that in addition to providing more workable solutions, shared learning promotes democracy and self-determination, vital ingredients of any life a person would have full reason to value.

For all this, Surat deserves great credit. Throughout the process, city leaders paid attention to geophysical threats and socioeconomic vulnerabilities. They used vulnerability mapping to identify areas of concern and devoted resources to providing important services to some of the most disadvantaged. Still some experts have criticized the Surat Municipal Corporation for not doing more to combat the city’s social ills. In their percipient study of the city’s efforts, Isabelle Anguelovski, Eric Chu, and JoAnn Carmin argue that Surat’s initiative-based approach has resulted in “projects and programs that continue to be institutionally distinct from the rest of the city’s development and planning processes.” In their view, that has diverted resources from the more general mission of reducing poverty, providing basic urban services, and addressing inequality (Anguelovski et al., 2014).

It must be noted that much of the city’s progress does not extend to the Hazira Industrial Area, a region threatened by serious toxic exposures in times of disaster or accident and populated by some of the state’s most needy members. One reason, of course, has to do with jurisdictional authority outside the city limits and the tax base. But those are the kind of spatial challenges that vertical and horizontal networks are meant to address. Problems of cooperation and scale are the gremlins of disaster resilience.

Perhaps the strongest general criticism of Surat’s efforts is that for all its emphasis on social cohesion and “city unity,” the implementation seems remarkably top-down. There is no escaping that the internal drivers in this effort were the powerful business community and the political elite. Anguelovski et al. (2014) rightly fault the leadership’s “inability to institutionalize a broadly inclusive approach that has confined adaptation decision-making to a few experts in local government and in the [Surat Climate Change Trust].” That is, not all the right people were clipped onto rope line. As a result, leaders deprived themselves of some political legitimacy and, undoubtedly, some better ideas. Inclusion is particularly important here because the influx of migration, while it adds vitality to the city, also threatens to pull at the threads of social cohesion. It is vital that all groups climb this mountain together. In contrast, the city of Gorakhpur, another Indian municipality whose climate resilience efforts are supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, has shown that a more inclusive and decentralized strategy can work, provided there is sufficient organization at the grassroots level (although there are limitations to that method too).

It is important to ask how easily Surat’s strategies can be replicated elsewhere in the country. Before you get to green governance you need good governance. And that, in some quarters, is as elusive as a Bengal tiger. In addition, Surat is a comparatively wealthy city. Its reliance on foreign trade and investment is one reason the business community has been such a strong supporter of expensive infrastructure.

On my return to New Delhi, I put the question to Sunita Narain, a well-known environmental activist who directs the Centre for Science and Environment. She agrees that Surat really stands out. “I mean everybody looks at it and they say if Surat can do it, why can’t the rest?” But, she adds, “They have spent the time and effort to build government.”

True enough. Thus, one lesson for the global community is to experiment more with helping to develop good governance so that later investments in resilience can take root. It also makes sense to heed the lessons of footholds and rope lines. Surat could not have accomplished what it has if it did not already have an existing commitment to manage floods and avoid disease, commitments born of a crucible of past suffering. And resilience investments would have failed if the rope lines of existing government agencies, commercial interests, and activist networks had not been included at the beginning. Personalities matter too. Every city has champions like Commissioner S.R. Rao or Dr Vikas Desai, but facilitators need to identify them and gain their trust. Strong leadership is just as likely to come from the bottom of the pyramid as the top.

In neighboring Tibet, there is a saying that “wisdom is like rainwater—both gather in the low places” (Dalai Lama et al., 2016: 212.) If this is so, there are fresh springs throughout India and the rest of the world just waiting to be tapped. The resource is out there. It is time to start looking.