There is good news that much awaited monsoon has arrived but the bad news is that it exposed the shoddy work of authorities and government in the very first shower. Massive traffic jams seen across the city, especially in areas that are badly flooded including Dadar, Parel, Sion, Andheri, Jogeshwari and Santa Cruz. Residents complained that brand new water pumping stations on which the civic body spent over 200 crores failed to work after being damaged by rocks. Once again, Mumbai halts in waterlogging. BMC has kept itself silent over the news. This is strange, very strange. Every year, there is at least one picture of a BMC worker who is working towards clearing the choked drainage, however, we have not seen any of it this year. Every year, Government is passes budgets for drainage and doing their jobs. The ever-procrastinating people, who are not answerable to anybody, waste much of government funds. Thankfully, the privatization has spurred those workers to work hard and be answerable. For example, people working for the railways are now ‘lesser’ corrupt. I would not defy it but the point of escalations has been brought up to a higher scale.
Heavy rains hit the city, but look around, you will see the waterlogging, potholes on the road. Railways spend crores on escalators, but forget to protect it against showering. Water leaked everywhere on the metro stations and tiles are broken on newly build skywalks. Of course, there are attempts being made to ‘advance’ the facilities to passengers by installing escalators worth nearly 80 lakhs per set, which can speed up enough to cope with the rising demand of hurry for citizens. Ideally, the escalators are powerful enough and require more electricity than an elevator, depending on the number of people who join in. So what’s next? Fare of railway tickets too gone up. Here also, we are willing to pay for the facility given in return.
Scenario for railways’ commuters does require their employees to be disciplined and firm in their actions but someone should also keep up with the ownership to help railways spend our money wisely. Mumbai is also billed to have protected the monumental buildings. There are over 110 monuments in the city and each is derived in their own style, each of them needs protection in their own style and each style needs a special approach. Although, right now only the data is being compiled to know which monument will need what kind of facility for protection. We can witness that Taj Mahal has been going ‘yellowish’ and many credited the ‘acid rains’, earlier, which are mainly caused due to factories using thermal energy where the combustion rate of coal used is not even near 90 per cent.
Whenever it pours, thousands of commuters leaving for offices, gets caught unaware on reaching the suburban railway stations as trains gets cancelled due to waterlogging of tracks, as services on all three railway lines – Central, Western and Harbour – always gets cancelled. As every year, the civic body issues flood alert and keeps silent on their preparations. Large parts of Mumbai, including the central, western and eastern suburbs get flooded, and traffic comes to a standstill.
Water levels at 91 major reservoirs nationwide are the lowest in a decade – not more than 29 per cent, water levels at Indian reservoirs are 71 per cent of last year, or 74 per cent of average storage over the last decade, the CWC data revealed.
The 91 major reservoirs contain 157.8 billion cubic metre (BCM) of water; the capacity of these reservoirs is 250 BCM. Another 400 BCM water is available for irrigation in India through groundwater, according to this answer given by the government in the Lok Sabha (the Lower House of Parliament) in July 2015.
July 2016 is on course to witness the worst water scarcity in a decade, and the waterlogs too would be much more as Sena-BJP wasted their entire tenure just accusing each other but none of them really bothered to care for the city. Government came up with Minister centric apps, they are talking about ‘Achche Din to ‘Badal Raha Hai India’ but in reality nothing has yet moved. However, two years after coming to power, they are still blaming previous government’s inefficiency. You voted this government to power with great hope and faith. However, they are yet to prove themselves.
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