Editorial:When the Monsoon Arrives

It’s that time of the year again. The time of living in fear, planning ahead, and stocking well. Monsoons are still some time away [and if the Met projections are to be believed, will be ‘normal’ this year] but the jitters have arrived with the rather boisterous showers over parts of East and North Sikkim, and although slides and road blocks [save the ever-ready to slush out roads to Nathula and North Sikkim] have not occurred yet, once the monsoon sweeps in, even such disruptions will become routine and no matter how inured the people might have become to news of landslides and road blocks, such occurrences continue to irritate. They should shock, but irritation is all that they achieve in Sikkim. The weather has become a matter for concern again in Gangtok, with every evening that the skies open up creating apprehension over the status of water supply the next day. The dangerous conditions through which workers toil to keep the Selep reservoir supplied is quickly forgotten when the taps run dry and complaints and criticisms pour out. That said, while the workers deployed to maintain the supply lines coming from Ratey Chu to Selep deserve medals for their toil, what needs deeper criticism/ analysis is the role played by engineers and senior officials tasked with the responsibility to keep water supply flowing in the capital. It is accepted that the terrain is difficult and the weather temperamental, but this was always the case. Once the slopes started acting up, better engineering options should have been deployed and clearer planning implemented more in advance to mitigate the impact of nature with solutions offered by science. That has obviously not happened, and the situation continues to be grappled one shower at a time. A similar short-sightedness also plagues the emergency water distribution system which moves along roads, conveniently forgetting that Gangtok sits on a hill and a substantial number of people live too many flights of steps away from the roads to be able to run up and down with buckets of water. And while the water supply woes ebb and flow in the capital, the status of the national highway and the state roads slips away from the priority lists. The roads are prone to collapse big time with every monsoon, more so this season given their unsettling by the September 2011 earthquake; and despite the crores which one is told have been spent on restoration there is still no guarantee that travel will remain smooth this monsoon. The State roads will definitely remain temperamental and landslides will definitely occur. Sikkim lives in a terrain where this is bound to happen, but what makes it a certain is the annual ritual of knee-jerkism that defines Sikkim’s response to a cyclical phenomenon. Many retaining walls have been commissioned, several lakhs paid out for rehabilitation and relief, but when it comes to concrete policy decisions, the State is still feeling its way around. The Departments have not changed their style of working and the people continue devising new ways of putting more lives and property at risk. The jhoras, despite the now peeling signages making dumping in them illegal, still attract enough garbage every evening to clog and spill; the drainage patterns and sewage disposal still runoff on the streets, the catchment areas remain as denuded even as plantation drives get announced and undertaken. Everyone has forgotten Gangtok 1997 because NH31A 2007 was equally wrathful and not too many really ever cared for Yuksam 2004, which brings us to the present with laden clouds marching up to release their load on land willing and ready to slip away.