Natural calamity & shameless politicians

I think India is one of the very few countries, where there are several authorities and machinery for disaster management but on the ground when it comes to actual relief work – they tend to result so ineffective – almost in a big zero!

This is never exemplified well than what is currently going on in Uttarakhand.

Agreed – you cannot preempt the natural calamity; honorable finance minister even went on to intellectualize the debate with this ‘we can’t prevent’ line. Never mind it sounded more like an excuse.    

However what is of critical importance is the rescue and relief.

And in this we falter and then there is always the saving grace in form of our relentless army and military jawans. Salute these guys!

What is so poor in taste and extremely misplaced is the politics over rescue operations and the dead bodies of thousands of visitors to the Char Dham.

Almost all the parties are behaving in worst and inhuman manner. First there was inordinate delay to even start the relief work. And then there was show of partisan policies on who is in rescue operations and who should stay away from that state. It is so very disgusting. 

I guess there is no value of human life for these politicians. I haven’t seen such a poor show outside India in other countries when there is a natural disaster. 

In other countries, there is always a sense of unity to fight the situation with the high level gadgets, use of technology and most prominently – quick response time.   

Let’s not even get into the reasons of why this happened. There is such a mismatch and imbalance between the eco-sensitivity versus notions of so called development in the hill state or indeed all over the country. 

The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has sheepishly admitted that much of the massive destruction was man-made.

According to the media reports India will initiate the inundation mapping of the flood-prone areas but the exercise will be complete by 2022! The existence of such a convention could have alleviated the degree of the Uttarakhand disaster.

Mind you this is one of the worst ever floods. And there were almost 100000 people on the pilgrimage. Thousands are dead. There are thousands still stranded. And there are again instances of heavy rainfall and landslide.