With less than 60 days left until the arrival of monsoon, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has intensified its annual preparedness measures for floods in Mumbai. But in addition to installing numerous sump pumps and carrying out interventions in flood-prone areas, city officials derived their own artificial intelligence (AI) models to track ongoing mud-clearing operations and alert against fraudulent activity.
The move comes at a time when the civic body is under investigation in a Rs 1,100-crore earth extraction scam. Desilting is the process of removing silt, mud, and sediment that has built up on the bottom of a body of water, such as a river or drainage ditch. These deposits slow down the flow of water, resulting in flooding and flooding of cities during heavy rains during the monsoon.
How AI is driving transparency in mud removal
To carry out desilting, the civic body appoints a private contractor, who charges the BMC based on the amount of mud removed. Therefore, to ensure that no fraudulent measures are taken by contractors to inflate silt levels, city authorities rely heavily on AI models.
Since last year, the civic body has made it mandatory for contractors to record video footage of the entire process of sand removal, from removing it to loading it into trucks, transporting it and unloading it for disposal.The footage will be uploaded to the BMC portal and scanned through AI.
talk to indian expressAbhijit Bangar — Additional Municipal Commissioner (Project) said the AI model will scan the footage and report any discrepancies. For example, if you have a video that shows a truck being loaded in less than two minutes, that footage will be flagged. This is because it typically takes at least 7 to 8 minutes to load the truck after desilting.
“As a deceptive measure, some contractors mix silt with floating waste to inflate the amount of silt removed each day. This makes it easier to load the waste into trucks and the process is completed quickly. Since the AI model is trained on this pattern, it easily alerts you to significant time gaps in the system,” Bangor said.
“Contractors often upload old videos by copying them from another device. Changes in resolution or video quality are detected by the system and immediately flagged. Also, since silt is essentially a sediment, it does not cause dust movement during loading and unloading, but when waste is mixed in, dust movement occurs. These effects show up in the video and are immediately flagged by AI tools, after which the contractor is called out.”
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This year, the civic body has lowered its pre-monsoon sediment removal target to 8.47 million MT from the 12.03 million MT target set last year. “We have lowered this margin to ensure transparency and ensure that contractors are only paid based on the silt removed,” the official said.
Uniform mud removal
Mumbai has a vast network of drains, with 261.52 km of major nullahs (more than 1.5 meters wide) and 411.56 km of minor nullahs (less than 1.5 meters wide), as well as types of drains such as arch drains and roadside drains. The entire drain network in Mumbai is approximately 3,800 km long.
Of the total 8.41 million tonnes (MT) of silt to be removed by the BMC this year, 3.67 million tonnes will be removed from minor drains, 3.37 million tonnes from major drains and 1.32 million tonnes from the Mithi river.
As part of its pre-monsoon desilting drive, the BMC is focusing on unclogging drainage choke points in various parts of Mumbai to combat the annual flood disaster, officials said. As part of the measures, the civic body has identified a number of choke points in drains in Mumbai’s Sakinaka and Kurla areas.
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“There are several drains in Sakhi Naka and Andheri that are covered with traditional culverts. Due to this, our machines are not able to enter the drains and remove the mud and due to irregular maintenance, the drains are clogged to some extent and the water flowing through them is blocked, resulting in flooding and waterlogging of the area,” the official said.
He added that to address the problem, the administration will introduce manual machinery to unclog the culverts to remove the accumulated solid waste, mainly consisting of plastic items. Officials also said a targeted approach is being taken on all low-lying embankments adjacent to the Mithi river to alleviate flooding.
On-board pump
Officials further added that as many as 547 dewatering pumps will be installed in several low-lying areas of Mumbai this year to reduce the scourge of floods. This is the highest number of dewatering pumps deployed in Mumbai in the last three years.
In addition to this, the civic body plans to deploy 14 vehicle-mounted mobile pump units in Mumbai. These are portable pumping stations, primarily mounted on vehicles such as trucks, used to remove water from locations with difficult terrain, such as complex mining areas, construction sites, excavation pits, and flood-affected areas.
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Vehicles equipped with these pumps can navigate narrow, dirty lanes and congested areas. These will be leased for four years at a cost of Rs 8,800 crore.
“Excessive flooding and inundation has been recorded in some areas during moderate or heavy rainfall. In many cases, these locations have not been mapped as chronically flooded areas and therefore traditional pumps are not installed there. As a result, additional measures need to be put in place to alleviate flooding in these areas.”
On average, Mumbai records 16 days each year with an upper limit of daily rainfall of more than 100 mm, and according to the Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP), 35% of Mumbai’s population lives in flood-prone zones.
talk to indian expressa senior BMC official attributed the need to deploy more pumps to higher demands from district officials. “Ongoing construction at the district level of projects such as metro, roads and bridges has increased the number of flood-prone areas in several districts,” the official said.
