Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Every year, around the third week of July, a photograph arrives on our family WhatsApp group from my aunt in Hyderabad. It shows the lane outside her flat with water up to the door handles of the parked cars. The caption changes. The water does not.
The usual explanation is the rain, and the rain is easy to blame. It does fall in fewer and fiercer bursts now, and no drain built for an older climate can carry a month’s share in one afternoon. But this account leaves something out. The Deccan never had water to spare, and the kings and village councils who settled it learnt to hold on to what fell. They dug chains of tanks, each one spilling into the next one downhill, so that a heavy storm was handed on from tank to tank instead of being poured into a street. Hyderabad once had hundreds of them. Bengaluru’s old lakes worked the same way.
Many of those tanks, in both cities, now lie under bus stands, housing colonies and, in one case I know of, a stadium. Nobody plotted this. A dry lakebed in May looks like empty land, and a myopic kind of planning, the kind that reads a map only for the next five years, saw no reason to leave it empty. The tanks were not destroyed so much as forgotten, one plot at a time.
I do not think the answer is to dig them all out again; too many families live where the water used to sit. But I have noticed that the lanes which flood first often have names ending in ‘kunta’ or ‘cheruvu’, the Telugu words for a pond and a lake. The city has kept the names. It has only lost the reason for them.
Which of the following best expresses the central idea of the passage?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → City floods owe much to the slow, unplanned loss of the old tanks that once held the rain, not to the rain alone.
The writer agrees that the rain is part of the problem. But the passage is mainly about what the rain explanation leaves out.
- The rain does come in “fewer and fiercer bursts now”. Still, the writer says, “this account leaves something out.”
- The missing part is the old tanks. They passed storm water from one tank to the next, so it did not flood the streets.
- Many tanks now lie under bus stands and houses. They were lost slowly and without a plan, “one plot at a time”.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Heavier bursts of rain in recent years are the main reason why Indian cities now flood every monsoon. — Incorrect. Only partly true: the writer does mention heavier rain. But the rain is called the “easy” thing to blame, not the main reason.
Option 3: The old tanks of the Deccan must be dug out again if Hyderabad and Bengaluru are to stop flooding. — Incorrect. Contradicted: the writer says, “I do not think the answer is to dig them all out again.” Too many families live there now.
Option 4: Planners in Hyderabad knowingly built over the lakes to make room for the city’s growing population. — Incorrect. Contradicted: the passage says, “Nobody plotted this.” The tanks were forgotten, not knowingly destroyed.