Editorial:
When natural disasters stop being about ‘if’ and get reinforced with certainty as ‘when’, you know that it is time to get worried. As far as Sikkim is concerned, this ‘when’ has been a ‘now’ for a while. When it comes to nature, it is obvious that occurrences cannot be prevented. Centuries of living in a particular region grooms people to instinctively respect the brute force of nature and adopt lifestyles which mitigate the impact of natural disasters.
This preparedness of indigenous communities needs to now be resurrected and used to guide how the deployment of best available modern technology to help Sikkim pick itself up and rebuild. The urgency to wake up to such a realisation is rung in every year when the monsoon holds Sikkim hostage to its ferocity. In the recent years alone, this urgency should have entered the red band of alarm of public consciousness with the monsoon-imposed landslides of 1997 and then the temblor trailer of Valentine’s Day 2006 which bookmarked the destruction which followed on 18 September 2011 with the rattle of an earthquake and the rumble of landslides. The devastation has been extensive and its enormity will sink in only in the coming weeks and months as the rubble is sifted and the real challenge of rebuilding arrives once the immediate concern of relief and rescue is overcome.
This is not an attempt to add to the panic - although a little panic in the right direction might not be a bad idea for disaster preparedness - but a wondering aloud on when the realisation will arrive that development need not always involve the destruction of something and ignorance is not something that only government-sponsored awareness programmes can dispel. One wonders what happened to the hill people pragmatism which streamlined lifestyles over centuries to bring it in sync with nature, only to lose it all in less than half a century of concrete-delivered development. The people of Sikkim have traditional identified the best and most secure ridges to settle their villages in and in the past three decades, gone ahead and assaulted everything in the neighbourhood to compromise the stability of their settlements. Reckless construction, of buildings and roads, have delivered traps which spring every monsoon. The recent earthquake only teased out all the landslides in the making and accelerated their collapse. Neither landslides, nor earthquakes are new to Sikkim, they have been around since much earlier than these hills were populated. There is an argument being made about reservoir-induced earthquakes, but that is still speculative science and suffice to say that even without these, there have been mega earthquakes here in the past and will continue to occur. Sikkim did not land a berth in the Zone-IV categorisation of earthquake-risk areas with its hydel projects. This should not be seen as a defence of hydel projects, but a suggestion that if discussions on the earthquake are allowed to digress to dams and hydroelectricity, it will compromise Sikkim’s chances of formulating a resilient disaster preparedness plan for the future.
Ever since the 2006 earthquake, this section has been recommending retro-fitting of all important buildings – religious, cultural and administrative - of Sikkim, but has found no takers. Only structures which suffered substantial damage and were too significant to be allowed to remain weak were retrofitted thanks to some aggressive lobbying by those who matter. In Gangtok, the Raj Bhavan [which had to be vacated after Valentine’s Day 2006] and Enchey Monastery, received this technological assistance. While a building near Raj Bhavan has collapsed and huts in the Enchey compound came down, both structures made it through the 18 September earthquake with no noticeable damage. The State Archives Building which had been retrofitted after taking damage in the 1988 Bihar earthquake, weathered the 2006 earthquake rather well despite its proximity to Raj Bhavan which suffered substantially. If the Tashiling Secretariat too had been provided similar reinforcement, the confusion of departmental head offices functioning out of makeshift arrangements could have been avoided. There is still time. The Government should invest in retrofitting the more important buildings and then promote them as examples of what can be done. The technology can then be passed on to private citizens to adopt for their own constructions. After 18 September, there will be many takers.
Returning to the need to respect rural pragmatism, it needs to be realised that it is not modern excess alone which has pushed practical lifestyles to the brink. A major contributor to this extinction has been the rush of centralised planning which imposes ‘development’ on rural folk and when this becomes the dominating factor, rural lifestyles change into urban aspirations instead of adapting new technologies and development to complement existing patterns. Sikkim has already experienced the drying up of village springs and destruction of fields due to over-exuberant road constructions and even though its forest cover has grown in the recent decades, contiguity of the green belts has been constricted. Slightly more involved planning and this needn’t have been the case. Natural phenomenon like cloudbursts, flash-floods and earthquakes are blamed and now trigger panic, but the question one needs to ponder over is how come a people who have lived with cloudbursts, flash-floods and earthquakes for centuries, do not have lifestyle reinforcements to tide over them. The irony lies in the fact that these reinforcements have always been there, but now lie ignored, mistakenly rejected by some as examples of superstition and forgotten by others who now have access to imported concepts of disaster mitigation. All this happens because, like development planning, even disaster management is centralised and not organic. If natural disasters are to be effectively mitigated, rural pragmatism will need to be adopted to educate the disaster management planners. The only national model advisable for disaster mitigation is an acceptance for its need, not a checklist on what to do. Every village, every valley and habitation needs to figure out its own plan. What needs to be consciously pursued is a rediscovery of traditional lifestyles, cultural and religious practises related to the surroundings of the locations in question, not necessarily to revert to that style of subsistence living, but at least to realise what is important and needs to be conserved. It was not fear of the unknown which had villages identify sacred groves around villages in Sikkim, but the very practical need to have these green belts around to arrest the sweep of surface run off and feed its springs. This much, even junior school students with environment science text books know. It is just that this obvious fact is not applied to local realities. In Sikkim’s case, places should have become safer, the traditional practises reinforced with the improved access to scientific verification and planning. It has not happened, and now would be a good time to begin rediscovering traditional practises which supported conservation to inform modern responses to stalling natural calamities.
When natural disasters stop being about ‘if’ and get reinforced with certainty as ‘when’, you know that it is time to get worried. As far as Sikkim is concerned, this ‘when’ has been a ‘now’ for a while. When it comes to nature, it is obvious that occurrences cannot be prevented. Centuries of living in a particular region grooms people to instinctively respect the brute force of nature and adopt lifestyles which mitigate the impact of natural disasters.
This preparedness of indigenous communities needs to now be resurrected and used to guide how the deployment of best available modern technology to help Sikkim pick itself up and rebuild. The urgency to wake up to such a realisation is rung in every year when the monsoon holds Sikkim hostage to its ferocity. In the recent years alone, this urgency should have entered the red band of alarm of public consciousness with the monsoon-imposed landslides of 1997 and then the temblor trailer of Valentine’s Day 2006 which bookmarked the destruction which followed on 18 September 2011 with the rattle of an earthquake and the rumble of landslides. The devastation has been extensive and its enormity will sink in only in the coming weeks and months as the rubble is sifted and the real challenge of rebuilding arrives once the immediate concern of relief and rescue is overcome.
This is not an attempt to add to the panic - although a little panic in the right direction might not be a bad idea for disaster preparedness - but a wondering aloud on when the realisation will arrive that development need not always involve the destruction of something and ignorance is not something that only government-sponsored awareness programmes can dispel. One wonders what happened to the hill people pragmatism which streamlined lifestyles over centuries to bring it in sync with nature, only to lose it all in less than half a century of concrete-delivered development. The people of Sikkim have traditional identified the best and most secure ridges to settle their villages in and in the past three decades, gone ahead and assaulted everything in the neighbourhood to compromise the stability of their settlements. Reckless construction, of buildings and roads, have delivered traps which spring every monsoon. The recent earthquake only teased out all the landslides in the making and accelerated their collapse. Neither landslides, nor earthquakes are new to Sikkim, they have been around since much earlier than these hills were populated. There is an argument being made about reservoir-induced earthquakes, but that is still speculative science and suffice to say that even without these, there have been mega earthquakes here in the past and will continue to occur. Sikkim did not land a berth in the Zone-IV categorisation of earthquake-risk areas with its hydel projects. This should not be seen as a defence of hydel projects, but a suggestion that if discussions on the earthquake are allowed to digress to dams and hydroelectricity, it will compromise Sikkim’s chances of formulating a resilient disaster preparedness plan for the future.
Ever since the 2006 earthquake, this section has been recommending retro-fitting of all important buildings – religious, cultural and administrative - of Sikkim, but has found no takers. Only structures which suffered substantial damage and were too significant to be allowed to remain weak were retrofitted thanks to some aggressive lobbying by those who matter. In Gangtok, the Raj Bhavan [which had to be vacated after Valentine’s Day 2006] and Enchey Monastery, received this technological assistance. While a building near Raj Bhavan has collapsed and huts in the Enchey compound came down, both structures made it through the 18 September earthquake with no noticeable damage. The State Archives Building which had been retrofitted after taking damage in the 1988 Bihar earthquake, weathered the 2006 earthquake rather well despite its proximity to Raj Bhavan which suffered substantially. If the Tashiling Secretariat too had been provided similar reinforcement, the confusion of departmental head offices functioning out of makeshift arrangements could have been avoided. There is still time. The Government should invest in retrofitting the more important buildings and then promote them as examples of what can be done. The technology can then be passed on to private citizens to adopt for their own constructions. After 18 September, there will be many takers.
Returning to the need to respect rural pragmatism, it needs to be realised that it is not modern excess alone which has pushed practical lifestyles to the brink. A major contributor to this extinction has been the rush of centralised planning which imposes ‘development’ on rural folk and when this becomes the dominating factor, rural lifestyles change into urban aspirations instead of adapting new technologies and development to complement existing patterns. Sikkim has already experienced the drying up of village springs and destruction of fields due to over-exuberant road constructions and even though its forest cover has grown in the recent decades, contiguity of the green belts has been constricted. Slightly more involved planning and this needn’t have been the case. Natural phenomenon like cloudbursts, flash-floods and earthquakes are blamed and now trigger panic, but the question one needs to ponder over is how come a people who have lived with cloudbursts, flash-floods and earthquakes for centuries, do not have lifestyle reinforcements to tide over them. The irony lies in the fact that these reinforcements have always been there, but now lie ignored, mistakenly rejected by some as examples of superstition and forgotten by others who now have access to imported concepts of disaster mitigation. All this happens because, like development planning, even disaster management is centralised and not organic. If natural disasters are to be effectively mitigated, rural pragmatism will need to be adopted to educate the disaster management planners. The only national model advisable for disaster mitigation is an acceptance for its need, not a checklist on what to do. Every village, every valley and habitation needs to figure out its own plan. What needs to be consciously pursued is a rediscovery of traditional lifestyles, cultural and religious practises related to the surroundings of the locations in question, not necessarily to revert to that style of subsistence living, but at least to realise what is important and needs to be conserved. It was not fear of the unknown which had villages identify sacred groves around villages in Sikkim, but the very practical need to have these green belts around to arrest the sweep of surface run off and feed its springs. This much, even junior school students with environment science text books know. It is just that this obvious fact is not applied to local realities. In Sikkim’s case, places should have become safer, the traditional practises reinforced with the improved access to scientific verification and planning. It has not happened, and now would be a good time to begin rediscovering traditional practises which supported conservation to inform modern responses to stalling natural calamities.
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