Flood Fury

Flood Fury

For Misdeeds of a Few, Many Suffer Ranjit S Mooshahary As always, monsoon showers have inundated many places, Guwahati included, and cut off road communications. The Chief Minister surveyed the devastation in Lakhimpur district in a manner that has been in practice year after year — a few hours of aerial eye view from a chopper and meeting the officials and some members of the public in the district and returning to the capital the same day. Such visits are but a ritual destitute of any resolve to change the situation; the people continue to suffer every summer with no hope for a better next year. The adjacent district — Dhemaji — is even worse. The first rains flood the district and its road communications disappear thereafter. People are forced to live with the surging waters in stilt houses, helpless and hungry. Even without flood, the district is inaccessible and hardly is it in the circuit of visiting dignitaries from the capital. I travelled there in April; a three-hour floundering from Lakhimpur to cover the distance of 72 kilometres over the track that distantly resembled a road. Rains had not started then but the drive after the sunset was uneasy; the vehicle could land on some treacherous ground or get stuck in mud and water. Flood is a recurring event — predictable — and so it must be possible to tame it, control it and prevent it from playing havoc with the lives of the multitudes. No special engineering skill is required for this but only commitment and honesty. The flood-prone spots are already known, and to control it our engineers know where to make dykes, embankments, bridges and realign the roads. If only all that money sanctioned so far had been used honestly with this simple focal concern, the disaster could be averted. Human greed, corruption and lack of accountability are the main reasons for the recurring floods and not some hydel projects or the shifting course of rivers. This tendency to look for excuses is at the root of inaction; it is perpetuating disaster in all spheres.There will be a flurry of construction activities now that the monsoon has arrived. It gives fresh opportunity to make hay in the summer sun to those who have brought this calamity. The railways have laid the tracks all along the same soil, which are hardly breached. This should be the model to emulate in road making and other flood control measures. The flashflood washing away embankments and dykes is a myth; no work worth the name is done on the ground. The Ahom general Lachit Borphukan chopped off his indolent maternal uncle’s head to save the state from the Mughals. We need more of his likes to make the heads roll and save the people from the rapacious lot of fraud merchants.Our problem is not of fund but its proper utilization. It is inexcusable that the State Water Resource Department failed to utilize 33.6 per cent of Rs 1524.42 crore calamity relief fund received in 2001-02 to 2007-08 when the State is repeatedly flooded by calamities. Should we continue to suffer such disastrous inaction? Government within the Government This newspaper wrote some days ago whether the Finance Department was above the Chief Minister. It seems true. This department, in trying to regulate government spending, is actually impeding government functioning. Financial discipline is necessary but in enforcing it, the administration should not be rendered ineffectual. The administrative heads and the department heads must have discretion to function within their budgetary limits and not become subordinate of the Finance Department by having to obtain its approval for incurring expenditures, which are within their power to spend.More often than not, the Finance Department holds up release of fund for projects, delays sanction and payments through too many restrictions. Even the staff salaries and the pensioners’ dues are not released regularly. It has centralized financial administration so much that the heads of the departments can no longer sanction payment for even routine purposes without its approval or concurrence. It is not the remedy for ills but the cause of it, and it undermines accountability in administration.The department is like an administrative black hole — nothing resurfaces once gone there. It seems content to control from the iron curtains and sees no need to learn from the interface. Recently, to get a response from them I had to exercise my right as a citizen under the RTI Act having officially failed as the State Chief Information Commissioner to elicit one. Verily, the Finance Department is not only a government within the government but also a stronger government at that.Police and Politicians: The Two Common Faces They are the most visible public faces — the politicians and the police — and both make news more for the wrong reasons. The public distrusts them but cannot do without them. It will be of course uncharitable to say that the whole of the police and the politicians are scoundrels. There are some honest and conscientious among them and they are doing great service for the people.In the case involving the disgraced Assam politician, Ripun Bora, CBI deputy superintendent AB Gupta showed exemplary integrity in the face of a huge temptation. Bora gave him Rs 10 lakh to secure exoneration from a murder charge. He was promised even more but Gupta did what he was expected to do: he arrested Bora and his accomplices in a carefully organized trap. Gupta will take ten years or more to save that much money through his official income, yet he refused it. It proves that there are still honest policemen in this wicked world and they could not be bought. The media, however, completely ignored this aspect and did not highlight the singular contribution that a junior police officer made in combating corruption. When I was in the IPS in Kerala, I had always taken the stand that we should hand over investigation to the CBI whenever there was a public demand for it. It was not the issue of whether we could not do it ourselves but that we should be above suspicion. Resisting handing over a case to the CBI makes the people suspicious of police intention. When we agree to it readily, no one can accuse us for any motive and the demand declines. In one case, actually some politicians who demanded CBI investigation thought we would resist it, but when we agreed they were caught on the wrong foot — it put their political steam off and worse; the CBI found no substance in the case.Politicians use the police to advance their agenda but do not come to aid them when they fall victims of a situation. There are many instances of the crowd and militants killing the policemen on duty. Recently in the Gujjar riots in Rajasthan, a police detail deployed to guard the railways was outnumbered and attacked by the mob. All could run away but one got trapped in the railway tracks; he was caught and beheaded in cold blood by the violent Gujjars. The media ignored it; the public did not condemn it; and the police chief who stood by his men was shown the door. People should know that 29,255 policemen have likewise been sacrificed at the altar of duty up to 2007. That is more than all the martyrs of the Army, Air Force and Navy combined in independent India. The difference between the policemen and the politicians is that the former die so that others can live in safety and security, while the latter live in comfort and luxury at the cost of others. (The writer, a former Director General of Police in Kerala and Director General of the National Security Guard and the Border Security Force, was the State Chief Information Commissioner, Assam till he resigned on June 24, 2008. This column may not continue because of his new assignment) Source: sentinel assam editorial