NEW DELHI: When cracks first appeared on a pillar supporting a 12-storey residential building in New Delhi, just a few kilometres from India’s busiest airport, Rajesh Gera and his team assumed an earthquake had struck.
But the president of the Surya Vihar Resident Welfare Association, which manages the building, was mistaken.
Researchers studying land subsidence proposed a more troubling theory – the crack was a symptom of the city buckling under its own weight.
SINKING HOTSPOTS
Parts of New Delhi, especially near the Indira Gandhi International Airport, are sinking at a rate faster than any other Indian megacity, largely due to massive groundwater extraction.
The findings were published this year in the leading multidisciplinary science journal Nature, by researchers from India, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.
They pinpointed three sinking hotspots – all located within 12 sq km of the airport.
The researchers, who examined satellite radar data from 2015 to 2023, found that up to 878 sq km of urban land across five major Indian cities is subsiding, with New Delhi among the worst affected.
These five fast-growing megacities – New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai – house a population of 83 million in total.
Source: CNA
