The recent monsoon rains in Bangalore wreaked havoc on the IT city corridor. The newspapers and social media platforms are buzzing with pics of inundated streets, houses, and main thoroughfares in one part of Bangalore. My thoughts wandered way back in time. There thrived the Indus Valley civilization and we all have read about it in school. I remembered the excellent drainage system that this great civilization had. Will that excellence remain confined to the textbooks only? Don’t we have anything to learn from the past?
The Indus Valley Civilization dates back more than
5000 years ago. It had a vast spread from the northernmost corner of the Indian
subcontinent at Shortugai near the Oxus river (Amu dariya) to Alamgirpur in the
Yamuna river basin. It is considered the most well-spread out of the
near-contemporary Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations.
With this vast expanse, the innumerable artefacts,
pottery and ruins that have been discovered by archaeologists since the
colonial era speak of a stunning uniformity. Naturally, our thoughts would
point at some central administration that governed this civilization.
Surprisingly, that is also left to conjecture for the Indus Valley
civilization. This is because we are yet to decipher the script in the inscriptions
of the Harappans.
Archaeology has given us enough evidence of social
stratification in the Indus Valley town planning and the structure of residences
of the common folk. There are ruins of houses in all major Harappan cities such
as Rakhigarhi, Kalibangan and Harappa, Mohenjodaro, Ropar, Daimabad and many
more showing that the rich lived in bigger houses that were often two-storeyed.
The citadel and the residential complex are anyway profound identification
markers of this gradation amongst the Harappan populace.
What is further noticeable is the amazing town
planning with grid-like streets all over the Harappan cities throughout the
vast extent of this civilization. People say to learn from history. Perhaps it
is our best learning to follow the excellent drainage system that these
Harappans had. If we can recreate a minuscule percentage of this drainage
pattern of the Indus Valley people in our ultra-modern cities in present-day
India, we would certainly rank higher in the cleanest country index.
The drainage system of the Indus Valley civilization
was such that all the houses has drains that were connected to the main drain
of the adjacent street. These drains were covered with stone slabs. Moreover,
these slabs were removed and the drains were cleaned regularly. It shows so
clearly that the Harappans were well aware of sanitation and were strict about
maintenance and cleanliness.
As evidence of the same, Lothal, a dockyard of this
civilization in Gujarat shows how the drainage channels met at right angles and
there were provisions for the separation of solid and liquid wastes! (Reference
from https://www.harappa.com/blog/lothal-sanitation) . A similar system of
stormwater drains in the acropolis or citadel area has been excavated at
Dholavira, another prominent Harappan town in Gujarat. (Reference from https://www.harappa.com/slide/storm-water-drain-dholavira).
There is more to show as evidence of this remarkable civilization in terms of its drainage mechanism. A blog published by Nadine Zubair on harappa.com states that at Mohenjodaro, Sind drains were of a similar fashion as the other Harappan cities. There was a system for managing wastewater within the houses. All houses had vertical pipes in the walls that led to chutes opening onto the streets. Even the bathing floors had drains that let the water flow onto the street drains. These drains were made of baked bricks that were typically shaped to form corners. All the bricks were sealed with mud mortar.
How much more evidence do we need from our glorious
past to teach us the importance of proper town planning and sanitation? This is
what is missing from our modern-day city planning. There is no dedicated
thought or plan in the unmindful development taking place around us. Is it not
enough to pinpoint that we must learn from the past and take it forward with
the application of modern technology? That is what is called progress.