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When Delhi floods, the villages around it bear the brunt
Raota on the Delhi-Gurugram border reflects an agricultural landscape shaped by the flows of water and labour between the city and the village.
As the monsoon approached the National Capital Region, residents had to negotiate familiar challenges of waterlogged roads, overflowing drains and urban flooding.
Yet beyond Delhi and Gurugram lies another story that rarely makes headlines: the burden of protecting cities from floods is increasingly being shifted onto peri-urban villages that are at the margins of urban development.
Raota, a village located along the Najafgarh drain on the Delhi-Gurugram border, illustrates this reality. Like many villages on the expanding edges of Indian cities, Raota is neither fully rural nor fully urban.
