Like megacities in other developing countries, Chennai’s infrastructure has strained to keep up with its explosive growth. For a city built on a floodplain, development has essentially gone unchecked: Critical infrastructure—airports, automobile manufacturing plants, and IT centers as well as countless houses—have been built over streams and marshes. There are four main waterways flowing through Chennai; the Adyar River, the Coovum River, the Otteri nallah and the Buckingham canal. All of these drain into the Bay of Bengal, maintaining a check on any rise in water levels upstream and within the city. Due to rapid unplanned urbanization, and unscrupulous engineering along with silting and clogging, these waterways remain severely compromised. As a result, the worst affected were the southern suburbs that witnessed an unplanned real estate boom in the last decade with unapproved layouts springing up adjacent to wetlands and water bodies. At present, there are 150,000 illegal constructions encroaching and leading to a loss of 300 water bodies around Chennai. Since the panchayats (local government bodies) are unable to regulate unauthorized construction, residential development in low-level areas has mushroomed. Added to this is the inadequacy of drains. Unsurprisingly, most parts of the old city, with its robust drainage system were relatively safe from the flooding. Of the Corporation’s area, the 172 sq. km of the old city have storm water drains while the remaining 254 sq. km have none; even the drains constructed by the local bodies have not been connected to the rivers. While the flooding of the southern parts is recurring during winter, the flooding in the heart of the city exposed the government’s unpreparedness in anticipating the floods based on water release into the Adyar River and in disseminating information in advance for the residents to act. To prevent any catastrophe in the form of a breach in the reservoir, officials were forced to release more than 30,000 cusecs from the Chembarambakkam reservoir. Consequently, the Adyar River with its encroachments was in spate, flooding most parts of the southern and even central parts of the city. Plans of delineating river corridors and mapping of flood plain zones to enable the residents to know the flood risk factor of their localities have never materialized.