Goa, Aug. 4 -- It took barely 30 minutes of heavy rain on Sunday evening to ex pose what many traders say years of Smart City works have failed to fix. A short but intense downpour left parts of Panjim, including the busy 18th June Road and the Kadamba bus stand area, under water once again. Rainwater flooded roads, entered shops and brought traffic to a crawl as pedestrians and motorists struggled through waterlogged streets. For shopkeepers, however, the rain was not the story.

The flooding was. Many said the city has reached a point where water logging is no longer an unexpected consequence of extreme weather but a predictable outcome of every heavy spell of rain, despite crores being spent on Smart City infrastructure and repeated as...