It is very easy to comment on situations sitting in confortable places in US or Japan. If these guys have stayed in Mumbai these guys know very well how our government machinery works and what kind of struggle people have to go through to get simple things done. If you say this is a governance problem, do you think it is right? Elections come and governments change but the governance continues the same way.
To understand the problem you have to understand the root problems of modern India. The biggest problem in today's India is illiteracy and population growth, which is growing at an alarming rate. This is causing havoc in all spheres of life. People are not getting jobs, basic amenities like food, shelter and clothig. Small towns and cities are not able to cope with the ever increasing demand for these amenities. Not able to get anything people are migrating to big cities like Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. Now all resources in these cities are under pressure. There is such heavy overload on the limited resources in the cities that people are ready to do anything and pay anything to get what they want. There is inflation. Those who are not able to cope with the inflation are succumbing to the temptations of corruption and accepting the underhand money and are allowing corrupt practices to thrive. So we have illegal practices and anarchy going around in the cities.It is a vicious circle where one thing leads to another and the whole society is going down into the deep graves of stagnation and decomposition.
I as an ex-Mumbaikar cannot imagine the state that the city is in today.
Not only Mumbai but the state of infrastructure in IT hubs like Bangalore are pathetic. Bangalore roads get flooded even by a few drops of rain. Wonder what would happen if it faces a deluge like Mumbai did. Not to speak of the roads and chaotic traffic.
I salute the people of Mumbai for their resilience in times of any disaster, their sense of help/service for others and their will to bounce back.
The Met dept, the inactive govt and the ministers and bureaucrats should be held accountable and brought to book if India has to survive as a mature, modern, caring and forward thinking democracy.
Calamities arising from natural disasters can be minimised. Bombay for the most part remains an unplanned city, reclaimation of land continues, buildings continue to be constructed, new highways are being constructed, yet there are no visible signs of the city government taking steps to control water logging, one has urinate in one of mumbai's bylanes for it to get flooded, so how in Gods name can they combat a monsoon of such proportions?? dont blame the rain, blame poor planning, blame corruption, blame overcrowding, blame poor garbage disposal, blame not only the city officials who run the city but the inhabitants who occupy and elect these officials.
This kind of disaster does not happen every year and you cant be proactive about things which might happen once in a century. Agreed that we need to prepare for disasters and improve the infrastructure for a major city like Mumbai but it would only have reduced the intensity of destruction not totally avoid it. I live in Detroit and there are snowstorms here every year and still the worst ones can bring everything to a standstill if only for a day or so. So even though I wish there wasn't so much destruction and loss of human lives my hats off to everyone who has coped with and helped others live through this ordeal.
Heavy rains and the disaster in the financial capital of India are just showing us the other face of coin, the coin of development of India.When, loss of a single's life can deeply hurt the hearts of the people close to the life-loser, we cannot measure the damage to lost and existing lives due to this devastation. Moving closer to reason and causes of all this, we'd certainly find ourselves guilty to some extent. We always blame the system, government and public for not doing their jobs properly, for being sold for few pennies.
I ask myself and then others to just answer a simple question, don't we remain completely neutral to anything unimportant to oneself happening outside the home and office? Don't we try to be the first person in every queue, be it at railway station, movie theater, or elsewhere? Is it not WE who offers bribe to cops, when caught for violating the simple traffic rules? Isn't it WE, the EDUCATED ones, who find it extremely difficult to stay in long queues for giving our vote, just at the cost of those tea sips at home?
What all I mean to say is, we should revise ourselves to get our country in shape. We have to draw a line between important and unimportant!
