On the afternoon of August 8, the GoAir
aircraft from New Delhi would have reached Kochi on time. The pilot had even
announced the expected time of landing. It landed about one hour late. The reason
was poor visibility because of heavy rains. As the aircraft hovered over Kochi,
I feared that it might be diverted to another airport in which case we
passengers would have suffered a lot.
The taxi driver who had come from Kayamkulam
to pick me up told me that even on the ground, the visibility was poor. Such
was the intensity of the downpour. I learnt later that our flight was the last
to land at Kochi before the airport was shut down till August 11.
While crossing the Periyar on the way to
Kayamkulam, I saw the Shiva temple on its banks where tens of thousands of
people assemble on Shiv Ratri. It was virtually submerged. Only its red roof
could be seen from the bridge across the river at Aluva. It was the water from
the Periyar that inundated the runway forcing the airport authorities to close
down their operations.
Fortunately, the rains subsided in the
catchment areas of the Periyar allowing the airport to resume its operations a
few hours before the announced time. Many areas in the northern part of Kerala
were not so lucky. The rains caused landslides and flash floods that washed
away hundreds of houses, people, cattle and birds.
Wild animals like elephants were found
floating in the water trying to save themselves. I saw the video of a hapless
farmer, hailed as a Karshakashri, who showed his farm and house flattened by
the flood. He gave a count of the coconut and Areca nut trees, banana plants,
spice trees, cattle and chicken he had lost. He was left with nothing.
Even at the time of writing, the bodies of all
those who were killed in landslides and floods have not been recovered and
their last rites performed.
One good thing that has happened in the state
is that the ordinary people have spontaneously responded to the disaster in a
befitting manner. When the medical team at Malappuram did not find a secure
place to conduct a post-mortem of dozens of bodies recovered from under the
sand and soil, the faithful in a village allowed their mosque to be used as an
autopsy centre.
The thought that it would desecrate the mosque
did not occur to the Muslims as bodies of Muslims, Hindus and Christians were
brought there for post-mortem. Extraordinary stories of courage and compassion
have come from the worst-affected regions of the state. A cloth-seller who emptied
his shop to give clothes free of cost to those who lost everything in the flood
is today a Hero.
The common people have behaved in ways that
will do them proud. Yet, some nasty fellows used their social media accounts to
show the government in a poor light and thereby discourage people from
contributing to the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund.
Whatever be the drawbacks of the Fund, it is
the only Fund whose utilisation can be verified and found out through an
application under the Right to Information Act, watered down by the Modi
government. I was once offered a job by a newspaper owner who wanted me to
handle the money the newspaper had collected in the name of relief.
“The funds have been accumulating and we do
not know what to do with the money. Since you have been associated with
Deepalaya, you are the right person to manage the money for us”, said the Chief
Executive of the newspaper group. I politely declined the offer. One question
that came to my mind, though I did not ask it, was “why did the newspaper
collect funds when it did not know how to use it properly?”
The readers who sent the money to the
newspaper must be in fool’s paradise assuming that their money was used to
mitigate the hardship of some people. Little did they know that it was lying
dormant in a bank account, earning simple interest. Under the
circumstances, the CM’s Fund remains the best bet, to which this writer will
also contribute once he can raise some money.
This time Kerala was not the only state hit by
rains. Reports of death and destruction came from Karnataka and even
Maharashtra. As mentioned, the affected people stood up as one person to meet
the challenge. However commendable their conduct was, was it a substitute for
proper disaster management?
This writer is a layperson and is hardly in a
position to comment on such subjects as climate change which induces heavy
rains. A recent poem put it succinctly. There was a time when children said,
“rain, rain go away, come again another day, little Tony wants to play”. Many
of the people were not like the late Victor George who specialised in rain
photography but they all enjoyed the rains.
Today, rains cause dread among the people, who
realise that the car vipers are inadequate to wipe off the rains lashing the
windscreen. There must be some reason why the rains have become so fearsome. At
the root of it is climate change.
The other day, I read a detailed article with
photographs on the flood that devastated Munnar in Kerala. It was the British
who found that the salubrious climate of Munnar was good for the cultivation of
tea but when the floodwater came, it did not spare either the plants or the
planters. Munnar was wiped clean.
It took many decades to bring Munnar to its
present position as one of the hot tourist spots. The other day, my friend
Chidu Rajghatta posted a few satellite pictures on his Facebook wall. He wanted
his friends to identify them. Some of them succeeded, others did not. They were
upside-down pictures of India.
For an astronaut orbiting the earth, there are
no distinguishable boundaries except the seas and the Himalayan Ranges that
demarcate the landmass called India which also includes Pakistan. Madhav Gadgil
is an ecologist whose report on saving the Western Ghats is discussed every
time natural calamity strikes the south. Thereafter, it is simply forgotten.
He begins his book Equity and Ecology by
describing an imagined satellite picture, unlike the real picture Chidu shows.
Let me quote him: “Let’s for a moment imagine that such an image had been
available for that momentous year 1947 when India attained freedom.
“If we were to contrast that fictional image
with one captured for us by a satellite today, striking differences would be
readily apparent. The earlier image would have much smaller areas of barren
rocks and urban sprawl; fewer large bodies of water, but many smaller lakes
freer of weeds at the peak of the monsoon; much more extensive tree cover, but
a far lower extent of crop fields retaining their greenery even at the height
of the summer.
“Satellite pictures, real and imagined, help
us understand the radical changes in the Indian landscape over the past seven
decades.
“It is a landscape in which the natural world
is continually being replaced by a world of artefacts: where trees, shrubs and
grasses are giving way to plantations and crop fields, roads and buildings;
where rivers are being increasingly impounded with waters diverted through
underground tunnels to turn giant turbines or merely being disciplined to flow
along paths straight and narrow; where old wetlands are being drained and new
ones created in the form of waterlogged fields”.
All this has created a crisis. The floods are
a symptom of the crisis. Man has been playing havoc with nature. Many of the
areas, considered part and parcel of the Western Ghats, have been flattened to
fill marshy lands to erect malls and multi-storied buildings. The dams are
becoming shallower and shallower because of the accumulation of silt.
Forests have been encroached upon to build
townships and farms. Last week, a Malayalam newspaper published a large picture
on its front page. It showed a mini forest surviving the flood water that
flattened everything around it. In Meghalaya, one can see the sacred groves
surviving while soil from their surroundings has been washed away over the
decades.
If the hills of Meghalaya are barren, except
for the sacred groves, it is because of the indiscriminate cutting of trees. On
a visit to Andaman and Nicobar islands last year, I was shocked to find timber
plants sprouting everywhere. At this rate, the islands would lose much of their
green cover with disastrous environmental consequences.
Climate change is a reality which those in
power refuse to recognise for it would strike at their comforts. When a former
MP demanded implementation of the Gadgil report in both letter and spirits,
some thought it necessary to take a funeral procession of the MP. Nature has
left enough for man to meet his needs but not enough to meet his greed.
Alas, this realisation is yet to dawn on the
powers that be.
Vikram Seth writes in his The Elephant and the
Tragopan: An Ecological Fable in Verse:
“You say the town is short of water
Yet at the wedding of your daughter
The whole municipal supply
Was poured upon your lawns. Well, why?
And why is it that Minister’s Hill
And Babu’s Barrow drink their fill
Through every season, dry or wet,
When all the common people get
Is water on alternate days?
At least, that’s what my data says,
And every figure has been checked.
So, Bigshot, wouldn’t you expect
A radical redistribution
Would help provide a just solution?
To expect a redistribution is out of the
question when the richest man in India has a skyscraper to live where lakhs of
litres of water is consumed every month by a family which has five or six
members. In Kerala, an air-conditioner was a rarity a few decades ago. Today it
is so common that non-air-conditioned saloons do not attract customers.
One person who benefited from this year’s
flood is Kerala’s minister for power, MM Mani. Last year, he was the villain of
the piece. Even his party men accused him of opening the dams and causing
floods.
Nobody cared two hoots for the fact that a
river like the Achenkovil caused floods at Pathanamthitta and Pandalam though
there is no dam across this year. The floods this time was not at all caused by
the sudden opening of dams. If at all, the dams were opened, they were opened
long before they became deadly.
Can this be called disaster management? Before
that, what is disaster management? It can be defined as the organization and
management of resources and responsibilities for dealing with all humanitarian
aspects of emergencies, in particular, preparedness, response and recovery to
lessen the impact of disasters. In the wake of the Super Cyclone that hit
coastal Odisha, the government and the private sector built hundreds of cyclone
shelters which remain useful.
Given the frequency of floods and other
disasters, there should be a proper disaster management system. Meteorological
technology has developed so well that weather forecast is no longer what it
used to be, “rains moderate or heavy may or may not happen”. Quick warnings and
steps to move the vulnerable to safer places are the first steps.
Caritas and CASA are two agencies which have
godowns in different parts of the country where relief items are packed and
kept. They can be delivered at short notice to the needy people. Such practices
need to be replicated. Ordinary people can be trained to lend a helping hand to
those hit by natural calamities.
More important than all this is the need to
stop all the ecological violations happening with impunity. Development does
not mean turning verdant hills into water bodies and waterbodies into airport
runways and meat-processing factories. Development needs to be redefined.
The rich man who uses public transport should
be the youth’s icon, not the turncoat MLA in Karnataka who bought a Rolls Royce
with his ill-gotten wealth. In short, let’s be in a position to bequeath to the
coming generations a better India to live in than the one we inherited.
(Published on 19th August 2019, Volume XXXI, Issue 34)
