Straddling the city of Surat in India’s Gujarat state, the Tapi River provides the main source of fresh drinking water and irrigation for the more than 6.5 million people who call the metropolis home. Yet even as the river sustains lives and livelihoods in India’s eighth largest city, Surat’s geographic location along the Tapi also means that its residents face heightened flood risk, particularly when heavy rainfall leads to an emergency release of water from the upstream Ukai Dam into the river.

With the support of GFDRR, the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC), which is responsible for the administration of the city, has been embarking on an ambitious effort to mitigate flood risk in Surat.

GFDRR’s engagement has been focused on supporting analytical work, encompassing hydrological studies and hydraulic modeling, which has provided SMC with a much deeper understanding of the costs, benefits, gaps, and tradeoffs among a range of flood risk mitigation interventions under consideration as part of the Tapi Riverfront Rejuvenation Project (TRRP). TRRP is an SMC initiative to promote resilient, holistic development along the Tapi River.

The technical team has made several key findings that have begun to inform the design of SMC’s flood risk mitigation strategy, including through the TRRP. For example, with regard to the levee raises proposed under the TRRP, the team assessed that the specter of more frequent extreme weather due to climate change means that there is a need to ensure that space is reserved for raising those levees even further in the coming decades.

Moreover, the team determined that the TRRP’s proposed levee raises, although likely to mitigate flood risk from emergency releases of water from the Ukai Dam, could also lead to several critical bridges being submerged and damaged. The team assessed that there is thus a need not only to heighten or replace those bridges, but also to enhance forecasting and early warning systems (EWS) to improve the management of emergency releases from the dam.

The team also determined that, even though hard infrastructure measures, such as the levee raises, are central to the TRRP, its flood risk mitigation objectives can be reinforced by “room for the river” spatial planning approaches that carefully permit increases in water levels in rivers as part of a flood risk management strategy. In doing so, the team has provided a solid analytical foundation for SMC to go forward with hard infrastructure measures under the TRRP while also taking steps to protect aquatic life in the Tapi River, in line with “room for the river.”

Informed by these findings, SMC is proceeding with an update of its comprehensive masterplan for the TRRP, including its flood risk mitigation measures. In January 2024, a workshop was held with more than 60 officials to facilitate integration of the findings into the masterplan. The findings are also informing development of the proposed Surat Resilience Enhancement Project, which is expected to receive $196 million in financing from the World Bank. Anticipated for approval by the World Bank in fiscal year 2025, the project will provide critical financial and technical support to SMC in its efforts to increase flood resilience along the Tapi River, including in the context of the TRRP.

GFDRR’s support for mitigating flood risks in Surat is only the latest in a long record of partnership in India. Since 2007, GFDRR’s transformative resiliencebuilding engagements have spanned more than a dozen states in India. For example, in response to devastating floods in Uttarakhand State in 2013, nearly 2,400 homes were reconstructed following disaster-resilient guidelines, and in Odisha State, construction of hundreds of multi-purpose cyclone shelters and development of EWS sharply reduced fatalities in the aftermath of Cyclone Phailin in 2013 and Cyclone Fani in 2019.