Guwahati’s older commercial buildings face months-long waterlogging in underground parking lots every monsoon
Every monsoon, a familiar scene plays out in the underground parking lots of Guwahati’s older commercial buildings. The rain comes, the water rushes in, and then it simply stays. Not for a day, not for a week, but for months at a stretch, turning what was once a parking facility into a stagnant, foul-smelling pool that nobody dares to step into.
ALSO READ: Assam Government Schools Struggle to Keep Classes Going as Teachers Take Up Census Duty
It is a problem that has quietly grown alongside the city itself and has recently found an unlikely spotlight on social media. A trend on Instagram Reels has taken off in which users document what they call “still water”, pools that have remained untouched and undisturbed for years, slowly turning toxic. Researchers have long warned that stagnant water of this kind can become a breeding ground for harmful bacteria, including the rare but deadly brain-eating amoeba, and viewers scrolling through these videos are getting a firsthand look at just how bad the problem can get.
In Guwahati, this is not an internet curiosity. It is daily life for tenants of buildings whose underground parking lots have become, in effect, permanent reservoirs of dirty water. For some, the problem returns every monsoon, making a facility meant to provide parking unusable for a significant part of the year.
The mechanics of the problem are simple, even if the solution is not. Heavy rain causes waterlogging across the city on a near-regular basis. On the roads, the water eventually recedes, soaked up or drained away over time. But the water that finds its way into the empty underground parking lots of commercial buildings has nowhere else to go.
Once it settles in, it stays. Evaporation is slow and unreliable in spaces that rarely see direct sunlight, and with no drainage outlet, the water simply sits, stagnating, souring and spreading.
The problem can therefore continue long after the rain that caused the flooding has stopped.
A businessman who is a tenant in a commercial building in Fancy Bazaar described the cycle in blunt terms. During the monsoon, he said, there is no parking option at all. The facility floods on the very first big rain of the season, and the water does not leave for the rest of the season.
Within a few days, he said, the water starts giving off a foul smell. Algae begins to grow on the surface, and at times a strange foam even forms in the water. It gets so dirty, he added, that nobody in the building can even think of stepping foot there.
For tenants and others using the building, this means that the parking facility becomes unusable. What starts with the first major spell of rain can continue through the season, leaving the underground space inaccessible while the rest of the building continues to function.
The condition of the water also makes it difficult for tenants to simply treat the flooding as a temporary inconvenience. The longer it remains, the more noticeable the smell becomes and the more visible the algae and foam are on the surface.
For another tenant in a similarly affected building, the frustration runs deeper, rooted in years of failed attempts to fix the problem on their own. When the flooding first began, he explained, tenants would arrange for water pumps and container trucks to drain out the parking lot and haul the water away.
It worked, for a while. But the relief was always temporary. The lot would simply fill up again with the next spell of rain. The repeated flooding meant that the same process had to be carried out again, without providing a lasting solution to the underlying problem.
And now, he said, even the option of draining the water has become complicated because there is no clear answer to where exactly the water should go. The city’s drainage network, already strained, offers no real outlet for water pumped out of a private basement.
This creates another difficulty for tenants. Removing the water can clear the parking area temporarily, but the water still needs to be taken somewhere. With no clear outlet available, pumping out the basement does not address the reason the water enters and remains there in the first place.
The roots of the problem, according to a local real estate agent, lie in decisions made decades ago, long before anyone could have predicted how the city would grow. Most of the buildings suffering from this issue, he said, are between twenty and thirty years old.
When they were constructed, the builders never anticipated the rapid, largely unplanned urbanisation that Guwahati would go through in the years that followed. Drainage systems, if they were considered at all, were built for a much smaller and slower-growing city. Even where some provision was made, those systems have simply failed to keep pace with the scale of development that came after.
As Guwahati expanded, more construction and development followed, increasing the pressure on existing infrastructure. For older commercial buildings, the drainage arrangements that were designed at the time of construction may no longer be adequate for the conditions the city experiences today.
What makes the situation more troubling is how quietly it has escalated. There is no single flashpoint, no one incident that draws attention the way a building collapses or a major flood might. Instead, it is a slow, cumulative failure, one flooded basement at a time, one season of stagnant water after another.
Because the issue is largely confined to individual buildings, it can remain out of public view. Tenants have learned to live around it, avoiding certain stairwells, warning new employees and customers to stay clear, and quietly accepting that the parking facility they pay for will be unusable for a significant part of the year.
The problem also illustrates the difference between waterlogging that occurs in open public spaces and water that enters enclosed underground areas. On roads, water can eventually drain away or recede. In a basement without a proper drainage outlet, there are fewer ways for the water to leave.
The health risk, though, is not something that can simply be worked around. Stagnant water pools of this kind, especially in dark, poorly ventilated basements, create conditions in which harmful microorganisms can thrive. The same conditions that make for dramatic, viral Instagram content also point to a genuine public health concern sitting largely out of sight, beneath the streets of a growing city.
At present, there appears to be no coordinated effort to address the issue at a citywide level. Building owners and tenants continue to manage it individually, with pumps, trucks and patience, while the underlying cause, an urban drainage system that has not kept up with the pace of construction, remains largely unaddressed.
For tenants who have already tried pumping out the water, the lack of a permanent solution means the same cycle continues. The water is removed when possible, the parking area is cleared for some time, and then another spell of heavy rain can bring the problem back.
The issue therefore remains closely tied to the way rainwater is managed once it enters these older underground spaces. Without a clear drainage outlet, the water has nowhere to go, while efforts to remove it provide only temporary relief.
Until the city finds a more permanent answer, the water in these forgotten basements will likely keep coming back every monsoon, settling in for months at a time and waiting to be discovered again, whether by an unlucky tenant or the next viral video.
