Location Mumbai, India
Disaster Maharashtra floods, 2005
Ruchira Gupta is an English-to-Hindi interpreter, a former lawyer, and mother of two daughters. In 2005, she was working at a small law firm in Mumbai, India when heavy rainfall flooded the country’s western state of Maharashtra, killing 926 people. Between 1950 and 2015, there was a threefold increase in extreme rain events in India.
It was raining that day, and very windy. I was in my office, and one of my colleagues said he had heard on the radio that the trains would stop very soon because the tracks had become flooded. He said, “Ruchira, why don’t you leave?” He knew that I had two daughters and had to relieve my childcare by 6pm.
