Pune flood risk
Pune's flood risk is drainage-driven, and the city cannot see it happen. PMC's nalla network is 3,075 open storm-water channels carrying 1,014 km, and every flood in the record below came down one of them. What the city lacks is instruments and maps. Dattawadi, the ONLY telemetric gauge inside Pune city, has an 84-day recording hole running 29 May to 22 August 2024, so it did not capture the 25 July 2024 flood at all - a gauge at Nighoje outside the city did, peaking at 568.92 m against a 563.02 m median. And Maharashtra's water resources department publishes the city's statutory red and blue flood lines as 518 scanned map sheets with no vector file behind them, so the legal boundary of the floodplain cannot be drawn on any map, including this one.
The nalla network, and the rivers it drains into
PMC's own storm-water layer: 3,075 nalla segments totalling 1,014 km, plotted against the seven rivers and the canal they discharge into. Segment lengths here are computed from the geometry and agree with PMC's own length column to 0.4%, which is a check on the geometry rather than a restatement of it. TWO HONEST LIMITS ON THIS MAP. Not one of the 3,075 segments is named in the source, so Ambil Odha - the nalla the 2019 flash flood came down - cannot be picked out of it. And this is the OPEN drainage only: PMC publishes a further 141,341 buried pipe segments, left off deliberately because they are far too dense to draw and answer a maintenance question rather than a flooding one.
Recent flood events - 4
Contemporary accounts describe close to half the built city inundated. HOW MANY PEOPLE DIED IS NOT KNOWN, and that is the state's own position rather than a gap in our research: the Government of Maharashtra's current Pune District Disaster Management Plan records the disaster and states that no official casualty figure exists. A round number has circulated in retellings for sixty-five years and has never been anybody's official count.
The flood came down the drain rather than the river, which is the mechanism this page exists to show. The Ambil Odha is in PMC's nalla layer above, but unnamed there like every other segment, so it cannot be highlighted.
The city's own instrumentation missed it. Dattawadi, the only gauge inside Pune city, was in an 84-day recording hole from 29 May to 22 August 2024 and captured nothing; Khadakwasla_1 had a 96-day hole over the same window. Nighoje on the Indrayani did record the event, peaking at 568.92 m on 25 July against a 563.02 m median.
India-WRIS / NWDP groundwater level telemetry, Maharashtra →The most recent event in the register. In June of the same year the Bombay High Court ordered Pune's flood lines redrawn, which is the process that would eventually produce the vector hazard layer this page cannot show.
External monitoring sources - 2
We don't republish these; tracking dam-gauge live state lives elsewhere. These are the operational portals to use during a flood event.
The statutory red (100-year) and blue (25-year) flood lines for Pune. 518 scanned PDF map sheets, no vector form - see the data gaps below.
Daily storage and discharge for the Khadakwasla chain. This is the feed behind the reservoir cards on the Pune dashboard, and discharge from Khadakwasla is the upstream half of the city's flood mechanism.
What we don't have (Pune)
- NO VECTOR FLOOD LINE, and this is the largest gap on the page. Maharashtra WRD publishes Pune's statutory red and blue flood lines as 518 scanned PDF map sheets with no shapefile, GeoJSON or KML anywhere; text extraction returns no characters at all from the Mutha sheets. So the legal floodplain boundary cannot be drawn, joined to a ward, or compared against what is built inside it. Digitising 518 raster sheets is a project rather than a fetch. Retire this gap when the redraw the Bombay High Court ordered in June 2025 produces a vector file.
- NO NAMED NALLAS. PMC's storm-water layer carries an id, an object id, a project phase and a length, and no name on any of its 3,075 segments. Ambil Odha, Nagzari and Bhairoba nalla are what the flood reporting is about, and none of them can be identified in the data.
- NO DRAINAGE DESIGN STANDARD. Kolkata publishes that its sewers were built to carry 6 mm of rain an hour, which makes measured rainfall directly comparable against the network and is what that city's hero is built on. No equivalent published figure has been found for Pune's nallas, so this page carries no capacity threshold.
- NO MODELLED INUNDATION. There is no Pune equivalent of Chennai's CFLOWS return-period zones or Mumbai's iFLOWS, so no hazard choropleth and no depth or return-period extents.
- NO PER-EVENT IMPACT REGISTER. The dates and mechanisms above are well attested; deaths, displacement and damage are not published per event in any source found. The event cards therefore carry no casualty or damage figures rather than repeating numbers from news retellings.
- THE CITY GAUGE IS UNRELIABLE. Beyond the 84-day 2024 hole at Dattawadi, Pimpale Gurav sits at exactly 555.16 m for ten consecutive days and then jumps 18 m. Pune district has 120 telemetric groundwater stations and exactly one inside the corporation, so there is almost no redundancy when one fails.
Chennai's flood-risk page renders modeled hazard zones, 2015/2020 hotspots, drainage and sewerage overlays - none of which exist publicly for this city. This page surfaces what's actually available rather than papering over the gap with synthetic data.