Viral rains & digital drains: Online storms
Social media has become a parallel civic space—sometimes a tool for genuine problem-solving, sometimes a theatre for exaggeration and misinformation. The bridge was never broken, but the incident showed how fragile our relationship with digital truth has become.
The Tricity’s monsoon season brought with it the usual side effects—overflowing drains, traffic snarls, and umbrellas surrendering to the wind. But this year, another storm brewed online. A widely followed local social media page sensationalised a video claiming that a bridge in the Rose Garden had collapsed under the weight of the rains. By evening, the bridge remained exactly where it had always been: intact, steady and perhaps amused at its premature obituary.
That small episode revealed something much larger. The city today is experienced as much on screens as on its streets. Social media has become a parallel civic space—sometimes a tool for genuine problem-solving, sometimes a theatre for exaggeration and misinformation. The bridge was never broken, but the incident showed how fragile our relationship with digital truth has become.
Civic participation at your fingertips
There is no denying the positive transformation that digital platforms have brought. The Swachh Bharat app allows residents to log uncollected garbage with a geo-tagged photograph, often prompting faster action than phone calls ever did. RWA WhatsApp groups, for all their noise, often succeed in mobilising resources during water cuts, coordinating security, or organising neighbourhood drives. Even the electricity department’s complaint-tracking system has brought a level of transparency which was unthinkable a decade ago.
At their best, these tools allow ordinary residents to bypass bureaucratic inertia and participate more actively in city governance. A single post about a broken manhole in Mohali prompted repairs within a day. In Panchkula, a tagged photograph of a dark stretch outside a school led to swift action on a streetlight fault. In such cases, the smartphone becomes as essential a civic tool as a voter’s ID or an RTI application.
The fault lines of virality
But empowerment has a cost when information is untethered from verification. The Rose Garden rumour was not an isolated case. A routine repair at Tribune Chowk once snowballed into “cracks in the flyover.” During the pandemic, unverified WhatsApp messages about chemical “sprays in the air” and citywide lockdowns caused unnecessary
panic buying. Just a few months ago, hoax bomb threats to the Haryana civil secretariat and the Punjab & Haryana high court triggered full evacuations and security sweeps before being declared baseless.
Even authority has not been spared. Cybercriminals impersonated a Chandigarh DSP on social media, complete with forged IDs, to solicit money in his name. The consequences here are more than embarrassment, they erode trust in institutions and stretch civic resources thin. In the chase for clicks and quick shares, misinformation can destabilise the very systems that digital tools were meant to strengthen.
Living in the post-truth plaza
Chandigarh’s original plan was built on clarity—straight roads, open plazas, a city legible by design. Social media, by contrast, has introduced a new plaza into our daily lives: unplanned, noisy, emotional, and endlessly performative. It is here that civic complaints and wild rumours jostle for equal space, often indistinguishable in the constant scroll.
The challenge is not to abandon this digital plaza but to inhabit it responsibly. That means developing a culture of verification before outrage, and of skepticism before forwarding. RWAs and community groups can adopt simple practices of fact-checking before amplifying claims. Local media can play a stabilising role, offering measured clarity against the rush of viral posts. And for individual users, the test is simple: are we participating in civic improvement, or merely feeding the spectacle?
The Rose Garden bridge stood tall against both the rains and the rumours. The sturdier question is whether we, as digital citizens, can do the same.
