To be Prepared for Monsoon, Be Prepared Everyday

                                                  To be Prepared for Monsoon, Be Prepared Everyday

In this post I intend to show that I had thought ahead of the monsoon; indeed I had thought ahead of those who think about the monsoon! I am doubly ahead, so to say.

In today’s newspaper (The Hindu of 2025-09-25), I read an opinion post entitled, Follow the rains, not the calendar, to fight floods. I liked the piece. It has neither the tone of “preaching to the converted” nor that of “You know nothing.” It is not shrill, but loud enough to be heard in urban areas. It mentions the efforts taken by the bodies of governance in Vijayawada, Thane and Mumbai, certified urban areas along the sea coasts (Vijayawada might be not quite on the shore, yet the authorities of that city have been proactive, per the article; good for the city).

Even so, that is where the problem lies. The article does not mention floods, landslides along the road routes to the four supposedly sacred places, Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath. There are hardly any places that one would call urban spaces. And, frequently we hear about cloud bursts, torrential rains (as distinct from cloud bursts, but just about the same), landslides, floods and so on. Every single one of them we had failed to predict and in which we lost people, and for those who survived, livelihoods, education, markets, and for them the worst, their places of religious importance (remember the Kedarnath shrine some years ago).

It is time government authorities in India did a triage of disaster events and planned their activities accordingly. To be explicit about it, none of the Char Dhams are easily reachable; at least not as easily so as the urban spaces almost anywhere in India, even along the banks of River Ganga. 

Almost fifty years ago (the Buddha Purnima day in 1977) nearly a dozen of us cycled from IIT Kanpur to the banks of the river through a hamlet with a steep slope to the river bank, hired a boatman, disembarked and had a bath in the river and picnicked under the full moon (no romance in all these, and no panic either) and survived. But, if today’s scenarios were probable realities then, would we have embarked on that trip? Definitely not. I am not even sure whether that hamlet had survived at all, and if it had, as a hamlet or something larger, a village.

Climate is very fickle. I had made this point in a post in this very blog space entitled The climate does not know what it is doing, on December 09, 2018 (seven years ago, almost). The thrust in that piece, if global warming is indeed true (and we may not be able to hope for the best), then we should prepare ourselves for it, not in the way that the opinion piece in The Hindu focuses on urban spaces, but all across the nation, and the best option is to be prepared for everyday to be a pre-monsoon, monsoon, post monsoon, monsoon on the horizon, monsoon under the hot Sun, no day of the calendar left unprepared.

Do we have the resources for it? Perhaps not. But, it is the responsibility of the government to accumulate the capital of whatever kind needed without any delay, going beyond some bureaucratic authority answerable to the government. The government has to loosen its strings. No excuses, please

There is no point breast-beating after the fact.

Raghuram Ekambaram