Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Govt should prevent disasters during monsoon' that was published in Newsband

Govt should prevent disasters during monsoon

A vigorous monsoon is vital to India’s economic fortunes. Heavy rainfall in a short span of time creates paralysing floods that takes a heavy toll of life, wipes out crops and destroys hard-earned assets. The hundreds of crores of rupees periodically spent on flood preparation, relief and mitigation research

have not reduced the impact of heavy rain.

Urban India is no less traumatised by floods, but city governments have not learnt too many lessons from devastation and losses. Being able to live with floods in today’s dense cities requires that these lakes be desilted and restored on a war footing. New artificial wetlands may have to be created to compensate for those that have already been built over.

For the Environment Ministry it is retrograde to sanction large real estate projects without an environmental impact assessment. Some real estate companies have been slapped with penalties by the National Green Tribunal for encroaching upon lakes.

How many more decades we will carry on this flood relief and rehabilitation without doing the right thing? The country needs to hire the services of experts to harness water potential for irrigation and drinking.

India's annual rainfall is over 3.3 trillion Cu. M, which, if appropriately managed, are the equivalent of over 7,000 L of water per day for all the 1,300 million population, all the 365 days. Today, we have ether uncontrolled floods when the rains come pouring down during the monsoon periods, or more than 60% of the population are starving for water.

The availability of land and water resources per person keeps on decreasing with the increasing population and, therefore, settlement in flood plains is inevitable as the higher lands have already been fully occupied. As a result, lots of people are adversely affected when the rivers flow full during monsoon.

Floods and droughts have become routine cycles over the years. When summer arrives, people are left without water and in rainy season, plenty of inundation of cities and villages with water-filled fields and roads. The governments over the years lacked proper planning except impact and damage assessment rather than short-term and long-term measures on a priority basis.

Relatively prosperous cities have no excuse at all in allowing avoidable disasters to happen every monsoon, especially when much bigger challenges have been successfully tackled in other parts of the world.