Mumbai floods - disaster recovery plans tested

Floods in Mumbai are expected to continue this week as the death toll nears 1,000.

The city is the financial capital of India and the place where many companies based in Europe and the US have moved software development teams as well as call and support centres in a bid to cut costs.

The floods have caused havoc in the city, with meteorologists recording 949mm of rain on 26 July. Bloomberg reported Indian officials estimate the disaster will cost the city $1bn in restructuring and loss of business.

Despite the closure of banks and exchanges on Friday the city did its best to open for business today but reports suggest that infrastructure and workforces are still struggling.

Ashish Sonal, MD of Delhi-based offshore risk management firm Hill and Associates, said: "The city is unprepared. The local trains are cut off and most of the roads are underwater. The emergency services were not able to respond and the administration has failed to anticipate and respond.

"Many of the bigger businesses, especially outsourcing centres, have been affected. Many of the financial centres... have been affected and their business continuity has come under pressure. Even though the damage is not that high, some people cannot turn up to work."

In addition to the general chaos that surrounds natural disasters, Sonal said some companies have failed to prepare for flood scenarios and this is testing their disaster recovery plans. "One of the main issues is the large number of buildings with basements - water has flooded these basements where the control systems are, so you can't have power and you can't even get in there," he said.

"Mobile networks were affected and large parts of landlines too. Internet backbone services went down for three days."

Even people in Delhi have reported being unable to withdraw cash from ATMs as a result of systems failures in Mumbai. The CitiBank, ICICI, HSBC and the Reserve Bank of India are all reported to have experienced problems with ATM networks.

In an emailed statement to silicon.com, CitiBank admitted it had suffered difficulties: "The impact of Mumbai rains was limited to a few ATMs that had to be shutdown on account of power shutdown, loss of connectivity or water logging in the buildings/complexes housing the ATMs. The majority of our ATMs in Mumbai are functional and there has been absolutely no impact to ATMs in other parts of the country."

The company failed to respond to requests for comment on how its backend systems and call centres had dealt with the floods, as did HSBC, which had been reported in the Indian press as having problems.

But Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, global research director for the Commonwealth Business Council Technologies, said most outsourcing centres are based far enough away from the disaster zone for them not to be affected.

He said: "I can imagine that anyone who has business [near the area] will have problems - even just shifting staff around will be a problem. But most of the financial buildings are quite a way out of Mumbai. They are in Navi Mumbai. They are quite removed."

More than 15 million people live in Mumbai.