Project Name:
Flood Resilience
Client:
Rajkot Municipal Corporation
Year:
2025
Project Area:
104 sq.km
In partnership with the Rajkot Municipal Corporation, we conceived a project that presents a holistic flood assessment to bolster the city's disaster resilience. This collaborative project, assessed urban flood risk through three integrated lenses - rainfall inundation, surface water diagnostics, and groundwater recharge potential. By combining hydrological simulations, geomorphological mapping, and field investigations, we identified systemic gaps such as weak storm water connectivity, encroached lakes, and low recharge zones.
This multi-pronged methodology, aims to deliver a comprehensive diagnosis of Rajkot’s vulnerabilities and inform targeted storm water management strategies.
The project was guided by a robust three-pronged methodology, analyzing rainwater inundation, surface water runoff, and groundwater recharge capacity. This integrated framework ensured a comprehensive understanding of flood risk from atmospheric, surface, and subsurface perspectives. A critical institutional analysis was also conducted to map the complex stakeholder ecosystem governing water management.
The initial topographical, DEM analysis and watershed assessment revealed the city's natural southeast-to-northwest drainage path. This analysis highlighted how limited green infrastructure severely restricts infiltration, establishing the baseline conditions for high surface runoff and flood vulnerability.
Simulation of inundation layers was crucial to identify vulnerable wards, with schools, health centers, and slum clusters exposed to recurring floods. These hotspot maps linked rainfall return periods with at-risk infrastructure, providing a crucial decision support tool for emergency and development planning. This analysis revealed the disproportionate impact on marginalized slum dwellers in low-lying wards, translating hydraulic data into a clear map of social risk.
The subsurface investigation integrated geomorphological and geological data demonstrated the city's natural recharge potential - permeable valleys contrasted with impermeable basaltic zones. Check-dams by NGOs improved infiltration locally, but over-extraction and municipal dependence on shallow aquifers constrained resilience, calling for integrated recharge and water supply management.
Field visits provided critical ground-truthed evidence of anthropogenic pressures on the drainage system. The on-ground stressors: solid waste dumping, sewage intrusion, encroachments, and degraded lake systems. Such conditions blocked natural drainage channels (vokadas), demonstrating how mismanagement of surface water exacerbates urban flooding risks despite hydrological potential for recharge.
