Even Gurgaon’s most expensive real estate couldn’t escape this week’s floods

Flooding in Gurgaon this week wasn’t confined to poorer or older parts of the city — it swept through some of the country’s most expensive real estate as well. Garbage floated alongside stalled SUVs on roads cutting through DLF Cyber City, while even NH-48, the expressway connecting Delhi to Jaipur, caved in near Narsinghpur, where a 10-foot-long crater opened up during ongoing stormwater pipe work.

At the luxury Imperia Esfera complex in Sector 37D, a section of a first-floor balcony collapsed, cracking a supporting pillar — just a month after residents there had protested the builder’s neglect of basic amenities.

The city logged 115mm of rain over 33 hours this week, enough to overwhelm a drainage system authorities say they have been upgrading for years. Waterlogging spread across Sectors 31, 39, 40, 44, 45, 46, 56, 57, Sheetla Mata Mandir Road, Sohna Road, Basai Road, Kadipur and the Delhi-Jaipur Highway service lane near Narsinghpur.

The underlying cause is structural: Gurgaon sits in a bowl ringed by the Aravalis, with a 90-metre elevation drop between its highest and lowest points that sends monsoon water rushing straight into low-lying sectors. Roughly 100 British-era check dams once slowed that flow, but most have since been encroached upon or built over — the Ghata bund alone shrinking from 370 acres to just 2.