Every monsoon, Millennium City Gurugram’s image as the country’s corporate capital takes a beating because of waterlogged roads, paralysed traffic and stranded commuters.Ever since the infamous 2016 ‘Gurujam’, which brought the city to a 20-hour standstill, the civic authorities have spent around Rs 1,400 crore on upgrading and cleaning the drainage network. Yet, with more than 50 crucial intersections and residential areas submerged again this week, the annual crisis continues to expose the gap between government spending and results on the ground.In 2018, then Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar had announced a comprehensive drainage system overhaul to connect old and new Gurugram and restore the lost natural stormwater drains. Several of these projects, including a Rs 280-crore plan to build 20 check dams and 200 recharge wells, however, remain largely on paper.Over the past decade, the city has instead spent over Rs 700 crore on band-aid solutions such as temporary pumps and patching of potholes. The Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) alone spent Rs 503 crore over nine years on sewer repairs.But all these efforts have failed to check severe waterlogging. The impact was visible this week when Gurugram received 115 mm of rain in 33 hours—83 mm on Tuesday and 32 mm on Wednesday. Tuesday’s rain caused major disruption across the city. A 10-foot-deep crater appeared on the NH-48 expressway near Narsinghpur, where the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) was laying stormwater pipes. The cave-in triggered an 8-km-long jam that lasted late into the night.Commuters took nearly two hours to travel just 5 km. App-based taxis were hard to find, and some motorists abandoned their vehicles and walked home through flooded streets.More than 50 areas, including Sheetla Mata Road, Sector 9, Khandsa Road, Sectors 31, 45 and 57, and Sohna Road, were affected by waterlogging. Schoolchildren remained stuck in buses for up to five hours without food, while a cyclist and a cow fell into separate open sewer pits in Feroze Gandhi Colony.Defending the administration amid public fury, GMDA Chief Executive Officer PC Meena insisted that the city handled the situation much better than it had in previous years. “The city received over 80 mm of heavy rain in just three hours. Because of Gurugram’s terrain and some low-lying areas, a large amount of surface runoff is unavoidable. However, water was drained out within 30 minutes to two hours, depending on the location. No underpass was flooded, major vulnerable points remained clear and there were no casualties. We expect to improve further during the next spell of rain,” Meena said.He said major investments such as the Rs 453-crore Khandsa drain-widening project (which boosted bottleneck capacity from 500 to 1,400 cusecs) and the newly built Rs 105-crore Leg-4 parallel drain were finally yielding results.