Not Just Landslides

Editorial:
Climate change is playing tricks on the weather. Gangtok is sweltering through what, till a decade ago, was Rangpo weather, and even as June enters its final week, the monsoon is still to officially arrive here. The south-west monsoon is still sauntering in the south and west corridors of the country and yet to poke its head into the Eastern Himalaya. Now, even the pre-monsoon nor’westers are not delivering with the intensity expected of them, save a brief burst which inundated the Gangtok hill with mudslips and coverted streams coursing off from it into frothing rapids. All’s quiet now. The traditional date [Asadh ko Pandra Gatey] is less than a fortnight away but the fields are still dry. Of course, if the rains over the next few days, the fields will be ready, but despite everything that the national weather watchers have been saying, things don’t appear to be gearing up for a normal monsoon.
In all likelihood, Sikkim will again receive intense bouts of very heavy rainfall punctuated by dry runs this year itself. This is neither good for the farmers nor for the roads. And that’s climate change for you. Surely, someone, in some department should already be preparing an action plan on how to prepare for the kind of unusual weather which will likely become the norm now. That will require a proactive administration which understands Sikkim, and even as one awaits for such engagement to evolve, one hopes that the administration is at least shoring up for the routine occurrences which accompany monsoons in Sikkim. After all, it’s not only landslides which occur in monsoons.
The summer months and its attendant downpours are not just about landslides in Sikkim, they are also about spring and the birds, and on a more worrisome note, these are also months of sickness. The lower valleys have traditionally erupted with water-borne diseases in the months of June and July. Now, with global warming having kicked in, this troublesome period stretches into August. Every year, there is a lot of noise, lot of knee-jerking and blame-gaming after an outbreak. Attempts are made to cloak outbreaks in bureaucratese to suggest that they are not epidemics. Let’s make this year better. The rains are yet to arrive, the weather is anything but mild, and cases of water borne diseases are already being reported. But there is still time to get the trouble-spots cleaned up. The notorious-for-outbreak areas around Jorethang and Rangpo should receive immediate attention of the district authorities because unfortunately the civil society that could kick in some civic sense is still missing in the State. In fact, with Teesta behaving the way it has been this season, the entire stretch downstream from Chungthang should receive some advance attention. The doctors should maybe tour the at-risk areas and point out corrective measures in advance and maybe even submit requisition lists for medicines that will be required when the outbreak comes. PHE and RMDD Departments should perhaps check on the health of the water supply lines and the NGOs that receive funds for awareness camps, organise some on public hygiene. Agreed, there have not been too many fatalities resulting from water-borne diseases that swamp the monsoon months, but it has a severe impact on the overall health of the State. Proactive action might still not save residents here from their annual bouts of diarrhoea, malaria and other seasonal ailments that don’t even get diagnosed, but maybe, just maybe, there will be healthier kids around if some advance involvement is taken with an eye on the fact that monsoons do not only bring landslides to Sikkim.