Officially, the rescue operation of the stranded pilgrims and tourists
in Uttarakhand is almost over. Government figures say over 1,05,000 have been
evacuated. Government is capping the death toll at around 900. Speaker of the Uttarakhand assembly says some
10,000 could be dead while the chief minister of the state says exact number of
deaths would never be known. Mass cremation of bodies has begun but digging out
bodies from the mud sludge with boulders, almost three metres high, is an
uphill task.
And midst all this, the cry that was always there, desperately looking
for a voice, is now finding its listeners, introducing us to yet another horror
tale that we all knew, but wasn’t hearing about. Many cities of Uttarakhand
stand devastated. With homes gone and connectivity snapped, most of the towns
and villages in affected areas wear a deserted, ghost-town like look.
The two weeks of the Uttarakhand disaster, like any other calamity of
this scale, have given humanity a pain that will be felt forever.
But, at the same time, these two weeks of the man-made disaster have
also reaffirmed the strengthening perception of the masses about the callousness
of politicians and politicians-controlled bureaucratic apparatus in dealing
with the concerns of the common men, the proclaimed basic entity of the masses
in a democratic (read pseudo-democratic) set-up like India.
Three days before the disaster, to the ultimate devastation of June
16-17, to the aftermath of the cloudburst, glacier-melting and flash floods,
and since then, every detail cries out loudly to implicate the political apathy
and administrative delinquency.
As usual, in the aftermath of a man-made disaster, the blame game is on
and is getting uglier each passing day with more skeletons tumbling out. There
are clear indications that the state government was alerted multiple times from
June 14-16 of heavy to very heavy rainfall. The state Met department of Uttarakhand
had even asked the state government to evacuate the pilgrims. In fact, a
reporter told one of his relatives, who was in the upper reaches of
Uttarakhand, was advised by a high-level bureaucrat of Uttarakhand to climb
down two days before the catastrophe of June 16-17. Every finding into the
‘hows and whys’ of the disaster every passing day tells us the political
administration did nothing but slept over the alerts.
Experts say Uttarakhand has witnessed a boom of unplanned development
in recent years. Fragile ecology of the state has been manipulated beyond a point
of reconciliation with the nature. Riverbeds and riverfronts are encroached heavily.
Dozens of hydroelectric power projects (45 operational and over 100 under
development) and hundreds of big and small dams crisscross the state.
Environmentalists, activists and scientists have been regularly raising voices
against sanctioning so many hydroelectric power projects and dams without the
necessary scientific studies. But politicians always slept on the reports; always killed the warnings. In fact, they have vehemently pleaded with the
central government to denotify the preserved areas and not to notify more areas
as sensitive ecological zones that prohibit any activity detrimental to the
ecological balance.
In order to earn quick tourism money, the relatively inaccessible areas
like Kedarnath, which are under snow for half of the year, were made accessible
with poorly laid roads while the hills of Uttarakhand needed roads built with specialized
technology. These bad roads aided to the calamity monumentally. A report by the
Indian Institute of Technology (Roorkee) and the Bureau of the Bureau of Indian
Standards blames bad roads in contributing significantly to the landslides.
These bad roads did increase the tourist influx. But, being one of the
major infrastructural casualties in the aftermath of the disastrous floods, these
very roads stranded thousands in various parts of the state. The resultant loss
of connectivity further hampered the relief and rescue efforts.
Why didn’t the politicians and the politicians-controlled bureaucracy take
into account the expert warnings and views before connecting the remote parts
of the state with a fragile ecosystem of relatively younger and unstable
Himalayan region?
Each of these factors is a direct outcome of the human greed of
political corruption. Without politicians and the politicians-controlled
bureaucracy, such unrestricted and obscene exploitation of nature damaging the
ecological balance of the area wasn’t possible.
But it wasn’t enough. The obscene display of political corruption continued
unabated even after it emerged how massive was the devastation in the
Uttarakhand hills.
To continue..