Transforming Chennai: Building micro, small and medium enterprise resilience to water-related environmental change.

Chennai and its environs received a record-breaking 272 mm of rainfall in just 12 hours on December 1, 2015. This was 50% more than the city typically receives in the entire month of December, and came after more than a month of monsoon rains that had already saturated the ground. Floods inundated the city, including the airport, major train stations, and roads in and out of the metro area. The floods, reported to be the worst in a 100 years, resulted in the displacement of over 1.8 million people in the city, with economic losses estimated at $7.43 billion – $14.67 billion, making it the eighth most expensive natural disaster in the world in 2015. Both the flooding and its impacts were exacerbated by recent development patterns, in which urban expansion has taken place in hydrologically vulnerable areas.

Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), an important source of employment and an integral part of the Chennai metropolitan region’s growth, were significantly affected. As of 2011-12, 0.36 million were employed by 82,738 registered MSME units in the Chennai district, a subset of the metropolitan region.4 Many MSMEs are located in flood-prone areas, leaving their inventories, equipment, and offices exposed to damage. The floods affected over 10,000 individual MSMEs and are reported to have caused $250 million of damage over the course of two weeks of flooding.5 The economic loss in the aftermath—many firms are yet to fully recover—has not been fully counted.