Our politicians never fail to flabbergast me! The one that still has the power to startle me though one has come to expect the most ludicrous and preposterous statement from her is our very own CEO! The latest in her exceptional repertoire was her one line answer to a question posed to her about the water logging this city has to face after a heavy spell on rain. In her true inimitable manner she declared: Pray to God to stop Rains!
New Delhi is not the only city in the world to receive heavy rainfall. Moreover rains are the lifeline of our land. And our lady should be thankful for the climate change over the past decades because I remember Delhi when monsoon rains would hit the city non stop for days. Now we just have hours. Any self respecting city should have a proper drainage system. Ours has clogged drains and in my case we have a peculiar rain storm drain as it stops tow houses away, where the owners have simply filled the drain and cemented it. Moreover the frenzy we have seen in the last few months where every square inch of a earth on the roads has been cemented makes it impossible for part of the rain water to percolate as should be the case. The cementing frenzy is to unable to fill pockets before the next elections.
The other excuse that is thrown at us for any problem we may encounter is the helplessness due to the multitude of agencies that rule our city. So why not sort this problem once for all. I am sure we as voters will welcome the move. If a girl is raped we are told the police is not under the Delhi administration and anyway women have no business being out late at night, and even her daughter is scared after 10pm. If roads are flooded it is the responsibility of some other agencies . And this goes ad nauseum.
She is not the only one to come up with wise cracks like these; many of our politicians do be it their comments about the way girls dress to the very latest from the Bihar Education Minister who says: he cannot guarantee that the disaster will not repeat itself.
So let us take it from the top: if roads are flooded Pray to God; if you do not want to be raped stay at home and dress demurely and do not have a drink! We have had our share of this nonsense and it is not funny. We keep being told that Delhi is to be transformed into a second Singapore. It is glitzy malls and uber rich constructions that will make it happen. It is cleaning the city, disposing of its garbage, having drains that work and roads without potholes. We need to have an ace rain harvesting system and above all proper habitat by the ‘poor’ who play probably the biggest role in keeping our city going.
Maybe one should move in the other direction, I mean modernise the city from down to up.
Till then we are all praying.