The Rain Reign

The incident of the week for most people would be the deluge in Mumbai.

It was a rather enjoyable time for me, providing me with an occasion to have a 37 km walk, but I am being quite dismissive about the magnitude of the disaster.

Someone I correspond with, who is right now in Switzerland, wrote,
"I am astounded by the furry of nature. In one way I am
relieved by you all being safe and not being harmed by
this calamity. But on the other hand it is beyond my
imagination - the suffering of all the less
privileged people and sudden and surprising
near-death experience for many. May be this experience
would expose some harsh realities which otherwise get
buried underneath all the talk of development and
progress. I hope we all including those who govern our
civil life, would become more alert to develop
strategies to cope and avoid future calamities."

He has a point. It is futile to now assign blame for the mismanagement of the disaster and the fiasco that followed. We need to stop asking who screwed it up, and start asking what the concerned people learned from the disaster and what changes they are going to make in order to cope with any future problems.

First of all should stop dreaming of making Mumbai Shanghai, & start working at how to make it at least a decent & safe place to live, work and enjoy for everyone.

Secondly, we should be making long term plans for the metropolis so that it can better handle any kind of problems and still carry on. For Example if something like the New York Metro or the Boston 'Big Dig' Project had been in place in Mumbai, It would not have been affected by the rains and flooding as it would have certain mechanisms inbuilt to take care of the water.

Thirdly we need to strengthen the communication infrastructure. We need to find out why the mobile networks were out and we should strengthen them so that this can never happen in the future. It was noted that the real media of communication were the FM Channels, which could reach a larger part of the population as compared to the TV networks. So the government has to give more importance to the Radio, which functioned as the real link between People.

Fourthly, Like all mega cities, we should have an elected mayor, who is in charge of all things concerning the city from the Municipality, to the trains, from the police to other essentialities. This will enable one team to take all the decisions and be more accountable rather then a de-centralised spread out bureaucracy of several departments under various government levels.

P.S. Has anyone noticed that all the politicians have been relatively silent, be they from the Congress-Ncp, or the NDA. That’s coz the congress is at power in the state which happily ignored all the initial signs that could have diminished the extent of the disaster; The SS-BJP on the other hand is ruling the BMC which has a lot to answer for.