Karnataka chief minister Basavaraj Bommai’s statements on the flooding crisis in Bengaluru, are both correct and deceptive. He is right that, “all the tanks are full and are overflowing, some of them have breached, and there have been continuous rains, every day it is raining.”
But there is also a disingenuity in the above excuse, because not only is the kind of rainfall Bengaluru received on Sunday and Monday bound to become more common with climate change, parts of India’s IT capital go underwater even with regular rain, stormwater drains overflowing with just 5-10 cm of it.
In other words, the general cause of people’s misery right is less Nature than extremely poor governance, where sustained hydrological mismanagement has now drowned hovels and mansions alike.
As for Bommai blaming previous Congress governments’ mal-administration or DK Shivakumar taunting BJP for building poor infrastructure in a world-class city and destroying its brand image, this just inflicts further misery on the suffering citizen. She knows the work of making her home safer has to be done by multiple dispensations, just as a multiplicity rather than singularity of these made it unsafe in the first place.
From upgrading the stormwater drains to regularly desilting the lakes to more hydrologically sustainable building construction, Bengaluru has no shortage of pathways for flood mitigation. The necessary resources can also be mobilised. But for this political leadership has to helm a synergy of administrative and public will, to work together on change.
A glance over at Pakistan should tell us that the rains can get much worse. The question is whether we can ride them out better.
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