Delayed rains come with a downpour of problems

Finally, it has rained and a scorching Delhi has had a 10° Celsius respite from the relentless heat it had been simmering under for more than 20 days. Last year, the onset of summers was a delight. It would get hot for a day or two and then thunder showers would get going. In fact, the talk this time round was how the summers never really arrived in the Capital last year.

Summers being brittle are welcome. But, any sign of a weakening monsoon generally comes with a whole lot of issues. Not only do the ailments pile up (like conjunctivitis for example this season) at an individual level but also the dry heat leaves a lasting impact on the winters. This, of course, is true for urban centres. In the countryside, delay means huge financial issues and a crippling delay in cropping timings.

This year, by agriculture standards, the rain has got delayed by over a fortnight. The corn crop in the Himachal Pradesh, for example, needs to be sown in mid-June but was awaiting the rains till now. Many farmers elsewhere insist that a 15-day cropping delay means irreversible damage for crops like corn, oilseeds and pulses. Generally, June rains help the sowing centres of India in the north but this year, which is billed a recessive year in any case, June has been inordinately dry, prompting even Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar to acknowledge that there are, indeed, problems.

Even the Wall Street Journal has reported that India might be in a bigger economic mess because of delayed rains impacting the cropping. “A drop in farm incomes could further destabilise India’s economy, which grew at 5.3 per cent in the first three months of 2012, its slowest rate in almost a decade, in large part due to a slowdown in export growth and a fall in investment,” the WSJ report says. That apart, farmers have been spending a lot of their tight-budget money in buying diesel for running groundwater extraction machines in many areas of the north to tide over the delayed monsoons. And, they say, even the groundwater levels have gone beyond their reach so there is really a no-win situation staring out of an already gloomy year.

Not just farmers, even urbanites like you and me have had to go through situations best avoided. One phase of our power supply system is almost always tripped and outage means squirming without an A/C. Only last week in Saket, the harried public came out on the streets blocking traffic to protest the non-supply of water for close to a fortnight. That, as also power blackouts, made June a nightmarish month.

This, of course, brings us to why we still do not have a water harvesting system. Last year, for example, the rains were super-duper and a whole lot of it could have been sent back to irrigate the earth and raise groundwater levels through rain harvesting systems. But gallons and gallons of water went waste into the drains. Just a stiff law and this problem will start redressing itself but the Government, it seems, has a totally nonchalant attitude here. One wishes that if the Government is failing to mould mindsets into conserving water, the least we can do as informed and concerned citizens is to self-help and install rain water harvesting systems in our respective Resident Welfare Associations. It will help not just us but also our environment and our future generations. Isn’t that the least we can do? 

THAT ROAD TO HELL

Finally, the bus lane has been opened to other vehicles and that means that a huge chunk of traffic congestion will be dealt with. It was quite a simple thing to do really, considering that years ago one had realised that the BRT corridor was only piling up traffic and hence, increasing pollution, costs and road rage. But the Government, for some unexplained reason, turned it into an ego battle, refusing to admit that the corridor might not be as perfect as projected.

For people like me, who live just off the BRT corridor, the truncating of their favourite long distance road (Saket to ITO and beyond) was nothing less than a heartbreak. Those were the good old days (mind you, the traffic was overflowing even then) when a ride from Saket to ITO through Chirag Dilli took not more than 30 minutes at peak traffic. And that was despite all the traffic signals and red lights. There used to be hardly any pile-ups in those days of sanity when buses plied on either sides of the road and commuters did not have to dash out of the middle of the road bus lanes to reach the other end. One rarely took the Khel Gaon Marg or the AIIMS routes in those days as they were not only more congested but also longer and a drain on petrol.

Today, when Saket has become a fish market of activity with schools, malls, district courts and hospitals crowding up the single stretch up to the BRT corridor on one side and the metro bringing in a relentless sea of humanity on the other side, one never really thinks of taking the BRT corridor from or to home. But now that some sane man in a sane judicial system has directed that the traffic be merged, there is immense relief. On Friday, I took just 25 minutes to reach office on the BRT route as opposed to the close to an hour that BRT would gobble up earlier when bus lanes used to look criminally empty while private vehicles would be in an unending queue for close to 20 minutes at the traffic signals.

Actually, had the Government heard out complaints, the only thing needed to be done was to regulate the traffic lights in a more orderly manner, something which authorities did not think was needed. Today, when barriers are falling apart and the mid-lane bus stops will in all likelihood be abandoned if and when the court order makes the changes permanent, one wonders how much public money would have gone down the drain only because of a sustained blind eye of the Government. Why a feasibility study was not done earlier is a question no one’s wanting to answer.

Source: The Sunday Pioneer, 8 July, 2012