Editorial: Don’t Blame the Rain

The weather has been stereotypically unpredictable for these times of climate change worries. While this unpredictability might be inconvenient for individuals and their travel plans, concerned government agencies and professional organisations, the insistent ferocity of the end-monsoon showers notwithstanding, cannot be excused for the ease with which infrastructure – roads in the present case – have crumbled across the State. One night of around 197 mm of rain has littered the North Sikkim Highway with numerous landslides and carved away wide sections of the road, almost all such disruptions at the established troublespots. And this is why the excuse of rains, or even last year’s earthquake, cannot be accepted. It was obvious to all that the 18 September 2011 earthquake had weakened slopes across the State and heavy rains are a given for any monsoon in Sikkim. All agencies responsible for roads are aware of these realities and when they know, it is confounding that they are caught wrong-footed by showers every monsoon. It is North Sikkim Highway which has made the headlines in today’s edition of this paper, but take a look around, no other road in Sikkim is in any great health either. Wet scars on the road to Tsomgo can be spied from Gangtok and an excursion on that axis is ill-advised, but to undertake such an adventure, one has to reach Gangtok first and that requires running a gauntlet of slides peppering NH 31A from Siliguri to Gangtok. Traffic moves slow on this road, and even the slighted downpour unravels the BRO back-cutting experiments and then traffic grinds to a halt. Returning to the topic of unpreparedness, authorities, commuters and lay citizens have to start calling the bluff of road managers when they blame rains for the litter of blockages on Sikkim roads. Rains have been around in Sikkim for longer than these hills have had roads; rain-resilient roads should hence have been chiselled out here. The point being made here is that since NH31A has been the sole lifeline to Sikkim ever since it was cut into the hills and the North Sikkim Highway services not just the remote earthquake-ravaged district but also the Indian Army detachments posted there, shouldn’t those responsible for the care of these roads have developed the science and procedures to ensure that they did not collapse so facilely? One could understand when the road network broke down due to something unprecedented like last year’s earthquake, but how is it that the roads give up so frequently for something as common in Sikkim as rains? Enough is obviously not being done. When its road network cannot withstand something as routine as monsoon rains, how does Sikkim resolve its preparedness plans for disaster situations? Arguments like these return to this section every monsoon, and this repetition is probably because not enough pressure is being applied. The State Government has often complained of Delhi about BRO’s general tardiness and lethargy and now even the High Court has taken suo moto cognisance of the organisation’s obvious unpreparedness. These need to be supplemented with more noise and questions from the road users, the lay people and the civil society. The disorganised manner in which the weather resilience of Sikkim’s roads is being pursued needs to be shaken into some semblance of effective implementation.