It happened again. Gurugram — India’s Millennium City — the address of choice for business elites turned into a giant waterbody on Monday as heavy rain exposed, yet again, the fragility of its glittering infrastructure.Golf Course Road, dubbed the city’s “Billionaire’s Mile” for its cluster of luxury condominiums and corporate towers, went under knee-deep water within hours of the downpour. The Signature Tower flyover, one of the city’s busiest and most photographed junctions, turned into a chokepoint as vehicles waded through flooded stretches. Sections along the National Highway were no better, with commuters stuck for hours as traffic crawled — or simply stopped — through the slush.Cars stalled mid-road, two-wheelers were pushed through waist-deep water, and social media, predictably, filled up with videos of Gurugram’s poshest addresses looking more like Venice than the country’s third-largest office market.The chaos has become an almost annual script for the city — big-ticket real estate, marquee corporate addresses, and drains that simply cannot keep pace with the rain.Faced with the familiar gridlock, the District Disaster Management Authority stepped in on Monday evening, advising all corporate offices and government and private schools to shift to work-from-home mode from August 25, so that civic agencies get a clear window to repair roads and clean choked drains without added traffic pressure.For a city that markets itself as India’s answer to a global financial hub, the flooding of its most premium stretches raises the same old question: How long can Gurugram keep flooding into a work-from-home order every monsoon?


