Mumbai’s monsoon isn’t romance—it’s sewage. Short pipes, weak treatment, and billionaire apathy leave the city wading through disease every year, especially during the Mumbai Monsoons.
Rain on glass feels like cinema to some. From the 30th floor where they sip chai, stroke a guitar, post a moody reel, declare “creativity is exploding. They go into raptures on how the Mumbai rains give them the “Feels” Cute.
You believe and even relate to all “the rains are so romantic talk” till you step outside and the reality slaps you in the face: roofs collapsing, potholes turning into trapdoors, floodwater strangling you waist deep . Whats that now? Not instagram worthy poetry. Or pinteresty visuals. That’s sewage. And it stinks. Unbearably so. And Iet me tell you why.
Here’s the simple, not-so-pretty truth. Mumbai’s poop, like every other city’s poop, is supposed to travel through giant “marine outfall” pipes far enough into the Arabian Sea—and deep enough—so the ocean dilutes and disperses it before anything drifts back. That’s the whole idea behind outfalls worldwide:
distance + depth + proper treatment = shores stay safe. If the pipes don’t go far and deep enough into the sea or oceans, currents and tides just boomerang it back to the shore.
Let me explain.
Mumbai has three main sea pipes. These pipes are also called outfalls. Colaba’s outfall sticks out about 1.2 km, Worli’s around 3.4 km, Bandra’s about 3.7 km. On paper that sounds brave; in the real sea it’s often not far or deep enough for our hydrodynamics, especially when treatment of the disposed waste is bare-minimum or zero.
Let’s put those numbers in perspective, shall we?
Major cities around the world have outfalls ( marine pipes) that stretch:
- Boston: 16 km
- Ankleshwar, India (yes, India!): 55 km
- Sydney: ~3 km (and even that’s proven disastrous—sewage balls washed up on their beaches in 2024)
- Cartagena, Colombia: 2.85 km
- Average for these major outfalls: 19.2 km
- Mumbai’s average: 2.77 km
Mumbai’s outfalls are, on average, seven times shorter than what other major cities consider adequate. Our longest pipe (Bandra at 3.7 km) is 4.3 times shorter than Boston’s and 15 times shorter than Ankleshwar’s. And Colaba? At 1.2 km, it’s basically dumping sewage in the city’s bathtub and hoping the ocean will be forgiving. Spoiler: it’s not.
And the civic body’s own data admits the Mumbai outfalls fails the marine quality standard (the SW-II benchmark) essentially all the time. Translation: we’re dumping our shit too close, to our shores. This shit is weakly treated or not at all , and it regurgitates back to our shores.
“But isn’t waste ‘nutrition’ for fish?” Sure, in tiny, well-managed doses inside a healthy system. What actually washes back toward the coast in Mumbai after storms and high tide isn’t some gourmet plankton buffet; it’s a bacterial cocktail featuring E. coli and friends. NEERI (National Environmental Engineering Research Institute) literally mapped sewage clouds stretching kilometres offshore;
Sewage doesn’t care about instagram poetry, it follows physics. Add heavy rain and you’ve basically stirred the city’s toilet with a giant spoon.
And because we like to make a bad situation worse, about half of the city’s sewage—roughly 1,338 MLD—goes out untreated on a typical day. Untreated means raw. Nothing is fumigated, sterilized or sanitized before it is dumped into the Arabian sea. Raw waste means pathogens. So when you wade through “Mumbai floods,” yes, you are wading through dangerous biological hazards, the city civic bodies should have kept far many miles away and fully treated.
If you’re wondering “why didn’t we build this to global best-practice,” short answer: we tried pieces, we delayed others, and we under-treated most of it. Outfall ( yes the long pipes that carry waste into the ocean and the seas) design everywhere is judged by results at the shore—keep bathing waters within safe limits by placing outfalls far/deep enough and by treating adequately.
In Mumbai, both knobs (distance/depth and treatment level) have been set too low for 100s of years, which is exactly why those SW-II shore standards aren’t met near the discharge zones.
“Who’s to blame?” Pick from the greatest hits: decades of under-investment; British-era bones never meant for 2025 cloudbursts; storm drains that literally sit below mean sea level (so the sea pushes back during high tide); slum networks never fully connected to sewers; and award-cancel-retender loops that dragged on for years until the Supreme Court had to push BMC in 2022 to finally award seven new sewage treatment plants. Cost escalations, tender fights, bureaucratic yoga—take your pick.
Is anything changing? Slowly, yes. Seven big STPs—Worli, Bandra, Dharavi, Versova, Malad, Ghatkopar, Bhandup—are under construction. Average progress hovered in the 30s% recently, with official timelines saying 2026 for some, 2027–2028 for the rest. If these come online at the promised quality (tertiary treatment, reuse), far less raw muck should reach the sea and creeks. Until then, every high tide + downpour is a remix of every poop every mumbaikar has ever done.
So yes: the penthouse version of monsoon is romantic—chai steam and raindrop meditation . The pavement version is trauma and survival—open drains, back-flow, disease.
The Irony of India’s Billionaire Apathy
India’s richest industrialists live right here. In Mumbai. Some of these are amongst the richest families or individuals in the world. They live in the same Mumbai as the slum dwellers. Where floodwater reeks of fecal matter. But do they care? Does it seem like they do ? They throw weddings that cost more than some nations’ GDP. They collect private jets like sneakers. They build 30 story homes for a family of five while their domestic help’s kids wade through sewage water to get to school.
Mumbai Monsoon Sewage: An Ongoing Crisis
Imagine—just imagine—if even a fraction of that “look at me -Im so rich” money went into fixing the pipes that took the sewage into the seas in Mumbai. Some of that “The worlds most expensive diamond necklace being flaunted at Cannes” money went into building those outfalls the right way: far enough, deep enough, treated enough.
Some of that “I love animals more than I love people” money went into upgrading Mumbai’s storm drains so they don’t drown the city every monsoon season.
Some of that “I own 50 Rolls Royce’s” money went into connecting every slum to a functioning sewer so half our waste doesn’t go in raw, and our shores are not exploding with disease from contaminated water.
We’re not talking about charity. We’re talking about basic infrastructure. The kind that keeps your city—their city—OUR CITY – Mumbai , from literally turning into a giant toilet during the monsoon.
What legacy are we building? Billion-dollar weddings and Instagram aesthetics while the coastline marinates in E. coli? Air-conditioned helipads while children play in water laced with disease? A Bentley in the driveway and a flooded, sewage-choked street outside the gate?
The rich think they’re insulated. Thirty floors up, purified air, bottled everything.
But biology doesn’t care about your net worth. Or Status. Or the height at which your balcony stands. Disease does not discriminate between property and poverty.
And the next generation—their children, and grandchildren. Children of the Richie rich, the poor and middle class, ALL CHILDREN will inherit this: a city that chose spectacle over sanitation, opulence over infrastructure, designer foreign brands over livable local streets.
We can afford to fix this. We are rich as F**k. India has the money. India Shining. Mumbai has India’s richest billionaires. We certainly dont lack wealth.
What we lack is the will to redirect even a sliver of that obscene show off wealth toward the unsexy, unglamorous, non-Instagrammable work of keeping a city functional. And clean. Or grant some dignity to the lives of the workers who trudge to the homes of India’s billionaires in waist deep bacteria infected flood water time after time. It’s a miracle how the poor stay alive.
So when the rains come next year, and the year after, and you’re splashing through that familiar stench, remember: this isn’t a natural disaster. This is a choice. A choice to let our local infrastructure rot while fortunes of a few balloon.
A choice to build higher towers and longer yachts but not longer, deeper sewage pipes. A choice to leave behind a legacy measured in reels and Met Galas instead of clean water and safe streets.
When Mumbai finally pushes sewage far enough and treats it well enough that floodwater is just… water, that’ll be the day we can call this city truly modern. Until then, carry your umbrella—and the brutal honesty that, in these floods, you’re not just walking through water. You’re walking through what we refused to fix. And what the richest amongst us refused to fund.
That is the legacy we’re leaving for our grandchildren and those that come after them.
