Mahi way. Let's not sing so in this case

The national outrage and tears over four-year-old Mahi’s death due to a borewell fall in Gurgaon has since subsided. But, it will be worth our nation’s while to not bury itself in the depths of general disregard for human life. The very fact that Mahi is not the first but 20th such reported death is reason enough to introspect on where we, as a population, as a political force, as a social mahadesh, are heading.

Mahi died for a deadly cocktail of reasons that our befuddled democracy is too disregardful of, or should we say, doesn’t have the time to tackle. Besides the fact that Government has, over the years, turned a consistent blind eye to illegal digging for illegal tubewells over the length and breadth of the country, there is also this huge issue of the water tanker mafia supervising the proceedings.

Water experts insist that illegal borewelling is a huge issue which no one is looking into even as the water mafia grows unhindered both in callosity and power. Government records show that, in Gurgaon alone, as many as 500 open borewells have been tracked down, lidded and sealed. This, experts assert, is only the tip of this unhampered evil. There are many more which are constantly being dug up by the water tanker mafia that sells water in scarcity-hit areas by gathering it from these borewells.

And once they are done with the digging and the extraction of water, they simply leave the menace behind, not bothering to fill the mud back into those gaping and dangerous holes close to residential areas. And these are not the only ones being dug up. There are so many others which are dug to 50-60 feet and then abandoned when no water is found, thanks to the falling ground water levels.

It was long back that the Government had banned drilling of borewells, not just in the countryside but also in residential areas of urban centres. Borewell drilling, as per law, needs a valid permit from the department concerned and this permission is given after a requisite survey of the area and its groundwater level. Many a times, this permission is denied and therein starts the illegality of it all.

If one were to go into the depth of the issue, one would wonder why at all there is a borewell mafia doing such brisk business? Well, besides the fact that the Government is habit-bound to ignore all strains of mafia (land mafia, crime syndicates, tender mafia to name a few), the inept handling of the nationwide water crises also contributes to their existence and growth.

As India’s urban centres are growingly getting gripped by water riots (recently in south Delhi’s Saket area, irate residents blocked traffic in protest against no water supply for over a week), there has hardly been any effort to turn the tide. After all, environment is no priority at all either in the portals of power or in general mindsets. Till we realise that the water shortage issue is an acutely volatile issue all set to snowball, and do something (like keen and mandatory rain water harvesting for example) about it, borewell deaths will continue to be reported.

Despite the best efforts of the Army and Delhi Metro experts, no one could get to the little girl deep down for more than 80 hours. This speaks of an inadequacy of our disaster management drill. First help arrived for Mahi after one-and-a-half crucial hours (apparently this was the time she took to breathe her last) and the Army arrived only seven hours later. After spraying in the oxygen into the gaping hole, there was little else that could be done to save the girl, till a Samaritan came to dig ferociously, go in and pull out the dead girl after experts had given up the operation.

Just 24 hours after the tragic death of Mahi, a 17-year-old youth in Howrah also suffered the same fate due to inadequate help and dismal expertise in retrieval operations. A video grab of that Howrah operation sent chills of fear down many a spine. It showed the youth being pulled out of the pit with a rope around his neck! So, even if he was alive, there is all possibility that he might have died of a broken neck, thanks to the lack or expertise of the rescue team.

If a disaster management team is not trained enough to deal with solitary cases like borewell crash-ins, one only shudders to think what they will do in mass disaster situations like an earthquake or a tsunami.

Alarmingly, borewell deaths are not confined to any one region of India. They have been reported from the far South, from Gujarat, from the North-East and also from the hill States. And in most of the reported such incidents, death has been an eventuality. Yes, some lucky ones like the much reported Prince case have survived but such success stories have been few and far between.

It is a sad commentary on our state of affairs that help comes in generally riding on the pressure mounted by the media, especially 24X7 news channels which keep the issue on the boil and compel the authorities to react. A sound disaster management policy would be the way to go, but then these kind of agile decisions come only with honesty of intention and honesty of intention continues to be a casual casualty of politics.

As an emerging nation, India has fast caught up with the bad ways of capitalism. Socially, it is getting fractured by issues like teenage pregnancies, adolescent crime and breaking family values; economically, and despite the desi wrap to our economy, it is drowning in the sea of global recession; mentally, it is getting westernised faster than a bubble breaks. So, the argument here is, if it is indeed taking to everything Western, then why not take to other western mores — like good healthcare, like valuing its citizen’s life?

To end it all, Mahi died on her birthday not just because she was looking the other way. She died because the entire system was doing the same.

Source: Published The Sunday Pioneer, 1 July, 2012