editorial:
There might be roads snaking up all the hills and dales of Sikkim now, but footpaths and traditional shortcuts remain the preferred routes for the rural folk. City-based developmental planning is already imposing too many compromises in the rural belts for the indifference to their felt-needs to be excused away to the lack of funds. It is already more than amply clear that funds are never in short-supply, but the priorities are disturbingly skewed in favour of mega-contracts. A minor repair work for the convenience of villagers elicits scant interest in the departments which are preoccupied with grander plans and projects.
The obvious reference here is to the condition of the suspension bridge across Rodong Khola under Rey GPU on the hill across the capital. This bridge, like most pedestrian bridges in rural Sikkim, is a patchwork of rotting planks thrown over a suspension bridge framework. The reinforcements attempted by the users by way of stripped logs nailed to the original frame of the bridge are obvious, as is the frightening lack of any supporting frames on the sides. The planks do not need to split under the weight of the user to cause a fatal fall, tripping over a loose shoelace can throw one 50 feet into the boulders below. It is wrong for such poor infrastructure to be still kept open for use. The fact that it is not boarded up and condemned, misleads people into believing that it is still “safe enough”. Well, it is not. A youth fell to his death from it on Sunday and before that, many others have suffered broken bones to a misstep on this death-trap. What is more, in engineering terms, this is still a new bridge - completed only in March 2005 at a cost of nearly Rs. 11 lakh. Only experts will be able to confirm whether the culprit here is faulty craftsmanship, but to an untrained eye, it is not the craftsmanship which is to blame here but the planning. Only the parts of the bridge which were always known to be prone to wear and tear [like the wooden floorboards] have wasted away. To plan a pedestrian suspension bridge in a Sikkim which records rainfall for almost nine months in a year is a lapse in logic which should have been corrected a long time back. To sanction such a project without a provision for annual replacement of the floorboards, in turn, reeks of insensitive planning. The refusal to expedite a request for what are obviously urgently-required repairs, even after people have been injured because of the decrepit state of the bridge, is inexcusable. What is worrying is that the RM&DD must be littered with unattended applications seeking similar repairs for similarly dilapidated contraptions.
There might be roads snaking up all the hills and dales of Sikkim now, but footpaths and traditional shortcuts remain the preferred routes for the rural folk. City-based developmental planning is already imposing too many compromises in the rural belts for the indifference to their felt-needs to be excused away to the lack of funds. It is already more than amply clear that funds are never in short-supply, but the priorities are disturbingly skewed in favour of mega-contracts. A minor repair work for the convenience of villagers elicits scant interest in the departments which are preoccupied with grander plans and projects.
The obvious reference here is to the condition of the suspension bridge across Rodong Khola under Rey GPU on the hill across the capital. This bridge, like most pedestrian bridges in rural Sikkim, is a patchwork of rotting planks thrown over a suspension bridge framework. The reinforcements attempted by the users by way of stripped logs nailed to the original frame of the bridge are obvious, as is the frightening lack of any supporting frames on the sides. The planks do not need to split under the weight of the user to cause a fatal fall, tripping over a loose shoelace can throw one 50 feet into the boulders below. It is wrong for such poor infrastructure to be still kept open for use. The fact that it is not boarded up and condemned, misleads people into believing that it is still “safe enough”. Well, it is not. A youth fell to his death from it on Sunday and before that, many others have suffered broken bones to a misstep on this death-trap. What is more, in engineering terms, this is still a new bridge - completed only in March 2005 at a cost of nearly Rs. 11 lakh. Only experts will be able to confirm whether the culprit here is faulty craftsmanship, but to an untrained eye, it is not the craftsmanship which is to blame here but the planning. Only the parts of the bridge which were always known to be prone to wear and tear [like the wooden floorboards] have wasted away. To plan a pedestrian suspension bridge in a Sikkim which records rainfall for almost nine months in a year is a lapse in logic which should have been corrected a long time back. To sanction such a project without a provision for annual replacement of the floorboards, in turn, reeks of insensitive planning. The refusal to expedite a request for what are obviously urgently-required repairs, even after people have been injured because of the decrepit state of the bridge, is inexcusable. What is worrying is that the RM&DD must be littered with unattended applications seeking similar repairs for similarly dilapidated contraptions.
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