Abolish aerial surveys of floods, get down to basics through initiatives or face peril  

Abolish aerial surveys of floods

 

Samikhsya Bureau

Can politics survive without hypocrisy and pretensions. The answer is simple, ‘No’. These are the traits which rule us all and people love to live with it without the slightest hesitation.

Now, what is happening as most important and revealing, besides the political ranting over other things, is the fury of the nature in the form of rain and floods. All are concerned as an untold number has died and there is no enumeration how many have been affected. But pictures do not lie.

And the most disturbing feature that emerge amid this outrage of nature is the aerial surveys by politicians, be it CMs or PMs or whosoever. Not to be interpreted as cynical about politicians, this much can be said that, aerial surveys are perhaps the most discernible jitters produced at huge expenses from the public exchequer to fool or hoodwink the men at the bottom.

What do they see from the choppers ! Down below an unfathomable multitude remain submerged or held hostage by the surging waters, buried habitations, paddy fields and so on. The simple truth is such surveys are mere photo ops purported to be an exercise which is not only futile and thankless but, it deserves to be abolished as a practice.

For all of us, the aftermath of the rain and menace of the  floods have exposed where things have gone wrong. Every scream from the activists in defense of environment  normally fall on deaf ears while, people listen to all the lies and deceit from ‘netas’ enraptured.

‘River Bhima is in spate’, ‘ Flood levels in Krishna grim’, ‘Karnataka foresees no respite’ or so many drown in Palghar’ is the usual stuff of news headlines people are content with and the political dispensations, for the time being, are busy in something else.

It is above 39 years that one lady keeps her fight for Narmada and what has she got ! a label of a mere activist slowly paling into insignificance ? Medha Patker’s fight is not for nothing. Even activist across board have been screaming for a holistic way out in river management.

And the fall out is all for to see and which does not require a stupendous sum of money to fly a helicopter for an aerial survey by any neta.

In the face of climate change, rain or shine, but things are bound to spin out of the balance where one either drown or singe to finish.

But, nature has an irresistible instinct of restoring itself, and when it restores, it does with a vengeance !