Letters to the Editor
Mumbai Rains
(August 3, 2005)
Television images and newspaper reports of people wading across
the streets of India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, with water
reaching almost their heads once again expose the lack of duties
being performed properly by the authorities concerned.
What happened in Mumbai is shameful. The sheer negligence of the
local authorities in developing a disaster management system (and
in this case, even a decent drainage system), is something that
is to be condemned.
What are the authorities doing with taxpayers’ money? How
long can they keep blaming the old crumbling drainage system from
the time of the British Raj? Who is to blame for this and who will
compensate the families of the victims? The questions are endless
and the answers seem to be hidden very carefully.
I do not even want to imagine what would have happened if a tsunami
had hit Mumbai. Surprisingly, even after thousands of deaths in
the tsunami of December 2004 in India, the Maharashtra government
has not bothered to create a proper mechanism to deal with such
calamities. How many more of these incidents do we citizens have
to face before the authorities wake up?
An inquiry should be set up to investigate how and why something
like this could happen if the authorities had properly spent taxpayers’
money.
PRASHANT SOLOMON,
New Delhi
Published in:
The
Tribune, Chandigarh (August 8, 2005)
The
Hindu (August 3, 2005)
Telegraph
(Calcutta) August 5, 2005
|