Pre-Monsoon Jitters

editorial:

It rained a handsome 8 cm on Monday night. Unnaturally high for May even for the notoriously wet Gangtok, which is incidentally the wettest hill of Sikkim, receiving at least 350 cm of rainfall in a normal year. The ferocity with which the jhoras hollered on Monday night and the facility with which several mud banks in Gangtok surrendered and slipped down are enough to drive home the point. Official data reveals that the heaviest single-day pre-monsoon downpour in May for Gangtok was 8.2 cm nearly five decades ago in 1964. Of course, the rainfall, when the skies open with more purpose and laden with the South-West moisture, will be much higher in the coming. Be that as it may, the Monday inundation was intense and near record-breaking [for May]. The litter was there to see all across the highway from Singtam to Gangtok as news-reports elsewhere in the paper illustrate. It was a revolting sight to see sewage lines blow out the iron hubs and gurgle the collective waste of the capital on to the roads. Jhoras breaking their banks, damaging an already rickety bridge and an imperilled power sub-station, should worry every Gangtokian because if this is what an evening of intense nor’wester can deliver, what the approaching monsoon has in store, given the obvious unpreparedness of the people, is frightening.

Here are the basics- in Geographical terms, the South-East quadrant of Sikkim, its footprint spreading across the alignment from Mangan to Dikchu to Gangtok up to Rongli, is the max rainfall zone of the State. The South-West corner around Hilley in West Sikkim is the other wet zone and between the two sits the drier to-the-extent-of drought-prone spread of Namchi and its surrounding areas. This much, anyone who has lived in Sikkim for a decent stretch of years will know. Or will they? Apparently not, because even though meteorological data informs that Gangtok has an average of 184 days of rainfall, planners in the various civil works agencies of the State and Central governments refuse to make use of the dry winters to get done with their digging and scrapping. The plight of the sewage lines was undoubtedly worsened by the poorly timed digging along the highway in Gangtok. Digging on highways so close to the monsoons should be officially banned and any department which wakes up so late [as to begin scratching the roads in May] should be penalised. That should be the basic requirement of planning for a wet Sikkim.
What one needs to also bear in mind is that the rash of freak weather that Sikkim has been experiencing in recent years is no longer ‘freakish’ because it is consistent with climate change patterns. Sikkim now has a Department of Science & Technology with a longer name which includes “Climate Change”. The policy-makers should realign the focus of this department away from making people “aware” of climate change, to counsel other arms of the government on climate change adjustments and preparedness. Any student who has prepared for an essay/ debate competition on climate change will tell you that the intensity of climatic phenomenon are projected to reach extreme levels with climate change. There might be fewer days of rainfall, but the days when it rains, it will pour. Departments working on civil projects like roads, hydel projects or construction should be the ones who get briefed on what to expect in the coming years and adjust their designs and work schedules accordingly. Storm drains, for example, should not designed to receive 8 cm of rain over an entire day in May, but to evacuate this inundation within an hour. Having been caught off-guard should not be accepted as an excuse anymore.