Gurugram is actually drowning in its own real estate boom

After heavy rain on Monday, Gurugram – Delhi’s neighbour and India’s “millennium city” – was thrown into chaos. Waterlogged roads caused traffic jams that lasted hours, and vehicles, including cars, buses, autos and two-wheelers, were submerged. Social media filled with images of flooded homes, school buses submerged in water and children stranded on roads. Even TV channels, usually busy with noisy debates, woke up for a moment, citing public interest. 

Gurugram’s plight isn’t limited to its waterlogging. It also ranks among the world’s worst cities for air pollution. In 2018, it was ranked as the most polluted city in an international survey and during the winters the AQI index would often go above 500. When I was reporting from Gurugram before the 2019 assembly elections, I found that several residential societies didn’t have any electricity connection and ran on generators, adding to air pollution. The ground water quality too fares no better – Gurugram is one of Haryana’s 16 districts with the worst water quality.

Gurugram generates more than a third of the state’s revenue and houses international tech brands like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Meta. Then why does a city sold as India’s showcase of modernity so consistently reduced to third-world dysfunction?

Built on concrete, not planning

The answers to these questions lie in flawed urban development, poor solid waste management and inadequate drainage. Gurugram may boast glittering high-rise buildings and Fortune 500 companies, but over the past three decades, forests have been cleared, mining continues, and water bodies have been encroached upon. Whether it is the Bandhwari landfill or the ongoing encroachment of the Najafgarh wetland, these examples remind us that urban development here has largely been about construction.

Gurugram did receive heavy rainfall on Monday (according to the district administration, Gurugram tehsil received 75 mm of rain between 8 am and 5 pm), but a city which boasts to be “smart city” should have the capacity to withstand such weather. We have seen in the past that even with moderately heavy rain everything grinds to a halt in the National Capital Region. 

The bitter truth of Gurugram (and most of the metropolitan cities in the country) is that the cost of land here marginalises everything else that is required for a robust and sustainable urban development. Economy and employment seem to be limited to real estate only. 

Land prices have skyrocketed over the past few years, and this business has created a nexus between bureaucrats, politicians, contractors and companies, leading to institutionalised corruption. Real estate money circulates throughout the system, funding electoral politics, while elected representatives then help companies secure more contracts.  

Take a look at land prices in Gurugram. The updated circle rates effective for 2026-27 show a hike of 15 to 30 percent across categories.

These are rates fixed by the government for some of the top locations, but the actual prices paid by buyers are much higher. One dealer told this writer that land and property are often sold for as much as 10 times the circle rate. One example is the recent sale of a penthouse in DLF for Rs 271 crore, which works out to Rs 2.6 lakh per sq ft, or approximately Rs 23.4 lakh per sq yard. 

No wonder that  home prices shot up in Gurugram by more than 117 percent and the price of new projects launched rose by 160 percent in recent years. 

As prices soared, infrastructure continued falling apart. Gurugram floods not because of the rain but because the real estate boom devoured the land that once absorbed it. When almost every inch of land is cemented and forests and wetlands destroyed flooding is inevitable.

Where the water used to go

A state survey, cited by the city's own MP, Union Minister Rao Inderjit Singh, found nearly 75 percent of natural stormwater drains lost to high-rises and townships; an MCG geo-tagging survey separately found 65 of 181 ponds buried under construction. Critics and planning experts have long attributed this vulnerability to an alleged bureaucrat-politician-builder nexus, with documented cases lending weight to these concerns. 

In multiple ongoing land-release cases before trial courts, central agencies have alleged deep complicity between builders, politicians, and bureaucrats in granting irregular licenses across prime sectors. 

Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate continues to attach properties belonging to developers and retired senior officials over suspected disproportionate wealth. As urban water expert Depinder Kapur observed, unchecked nexus between real estate capital and administrative machinery has left Gurugram structurally crippled, forcing ordinary citizens to pay the recurring monsoon price. 

Today the rain water flowing down from the Aravalli Hills (whatever is left of them) has no place to go because all natural drains have been encroached upon or blocked. Instead of flowing into wetlands like the Najafgarh Lake, the runoff from the Aravallis increasingly converges on the built-up city, overwhelming its already inadequate drainage network and flooding roads, basements and low-lying areas. A TERI assessment of Gurugram found that encroachment and urbanisation had blocked natural drains and destroyed water bodies that were crucial to draining rainwater. 

Ankur Bisen, author of the book Wasted and a Gurugram resident, says the city’s rapid urbanisation has come at the expense of its natural drainage systems, water bodies and wetlands. He believes the recurring waterlogging is a symptom of a much deeper failure in the way the city has been planned and developed.

“Around 200 water bodies, low lying areas were appropriated, razed, levelled and sold as real estate chucks with scant regard to natural water flows to build this city. Developers then poured concrete without building a drainage system. The government spends INR 1,000 crore every year on waste management and much of it on cuts and salaries and without proper waste management infrastructure that allows single use plastic waste to choke rain water flows. I continue to witness in the last decade how ponds were reduced to cess pools and that were dried out later to be sold as real estate. Basai wetland, just a decade ago used to be a bird watching paradise and now it is only in dreams. The water clogging is symbolic of all of it.”

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