Can a town be overweight? Shimla, capital of Himachal Pradesh, has managed to become just that. The load, as always, has been piling on over the years. In this case, storey by storey.
The erstwhile summer capital of the British empire, once hailed as the Queen of Hill Stations, has now become an outsized, uncontrolled monster in urgent need of therapy.

When prashant krishnan, vinita garg, aditya jha, gurpreet singh and neeraj kumar set out to map Mayapuri s drainage,they had no inkling that new lessons on sewerage would be in the offing

• Engineers moved more than 10,000,000 cubic meters (cum) of earth in building the road; enough to build a wall three feet wide and 10 feet high, from New York to San Francisco

• They also dug 1,000,000 cum of gravel from river beds to surface the road; if loaded on rail cars the gravel train would be more than 600 kilometres long

Port cities set up by Dutch colonists had ingenuous drainage systems