Urban Flooding on the Delhi Yamuna: Floodplain Topography and the Limits of Ghat Redevelopment
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Urban flooding in India is conventionally attributed to extreme rainfall and inadequate drainage capacity. The July 2023 Yamuna flood in Delhi contradicts that account. The river reached an all-time high flood level (208.66 m) at the Old Railway Bridge while carrying an outflow of only 3.59 lakh cusecs from Hathnikund Barrage — less than half the 8.28 lakh cusecs that produced a peak of just 206.60 m in 2019. This paper contributes a primary topographic dataset from a ground GPS survey of 14,039 points across a 1,105 ha reach of the Yamuna floodplain at Wazirabad, North Delhi. The surveyed terrain is exceptionally flat (71.7% of points within a four-metre band, σ = 2.32 m), so that 41.4% of the reach lay below the 2019 peak and 76.1% below the 2023 HFL. The paper proposes permeability retention as the governing design constraint for ghat redevelopment in this reach.
Author: Yash, Arora
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212147574
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