The month of April was one of the wettest months in the contemporary history of Kashmir. We had rainfall for about 20 days in Kashmir valley. The higher reaches of Kashmir witnessed a significant amount of snowfall as well. Just at the start of this week Srinagar study was staring at the prospect of getting flooded vividly reminding us of the deluge of 2014 when the entire civil lines area of Srinagar got flooded.
So, the question that everyone is asking on the streets of Srinagar is a simple one – what is the establishment doing to prevent a repeat of 2014? Some are asking this question loudly, some in an angry tone and some in calibrated whispers – but there is not a single soul in the whole valley who is not asking this question.
Around 60 houses in Ramban district were damaged due to land sinking in Parnote village on Ramban-Gool Road. 500 victims of the land sinking incident were forced to leave their unsafe and damaged houses. If we add the number of houses which are partially damaged then this area has the potential to be a set of a horror movie – an entire movie can be shot here unedited. The situation in north Kashmir is equally bad with thousands of apple trees being uprooted in a single day, many villages flooded and schools and colleges shut down due to inundation.
The World Bank had provided huge funding to J&K for flood mitigation post-2014. With an aim to formulate a detailed action plan to overcome future flood threats in Kashmir valley the Ministry of Water Resources Govt of India had on September 18 2014 issued orders to conduct an in-depth study and analysis of the unprecedented floods in Kashmir.
The roadmap suggested a series of steps to be taken in a phased manner over the next ten to fifteen years. A decade on we now are as vulnerable to the floods as we were in 2014. This status has to change. The government must prioritize work on this front and come out with a fortnightly progress report on the same.
Floods are a serious threat to an agrarian-based economy like ours. It is only after threadbare implementation of a series of assiduously-knit plan of action that we can be rest assured that the Srinagar city has a backup plan to avoid getting flooded from the rising waters of Jhelum.
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