It will continue to rain trouble

It took two hours of downpour to remind everyone of the utter inadequacy of infrastructure and lack of a crisis management team to handle even a minor event of the sort one saw on Friday night.

There were copious rains and, as usual, low lying areas were inundated, vehicles stranded, trees fell, walls collapsed. Nothing really new, it has been the case in the city in the past two decades. A downpour of more than 30 minutes floods some low-lying area or the other and this seems to be happening quite regularly. You simply need to turn the pages of newspaper files to figure out this is a recurring annual phenomenon.

The southwest monsoon, or for that matter, the northeast monsoon will never skirt Bangalore, and thank god for that. The city receives a fair amount of rainfall in both the seasons. That has been the case for centuries, but it appears as though post-rain management of civic facilities has become a major issue in the last few years.

It might be entirely wrong, but public perception is that civic agencies, the BBMP in particular, are never ever equipped to handle the large volume of emergency appeals. Not only that, there is the belief that these agencies are not bothered either and let affected citizens — those caught in traffic jams and those worried about rising water levels in their homes — fend for themselves. It could be Ejipura one year, Puttenahalli some other year. You can even predict, without the benefit of deep urban planning knowledge, the areas likely to be affected next year.

You can, likewise, predict that next year too, the BBMP and other agencies will be caught unawares when there is another downpour. The city can cope with that too, but the problem is that pressure on every kind of service in the city is mounting because of the increase in population and a slight disruption can completely throw life out of gear.

Those who manage the city do not seem to have any solutions for this. In fact, they do not even seem to be managing anything and that is why tempers rise every time there is chaos of this sort.
Which brings up the question, what happened to all the money that was supposedly spent on improving the storm water drainage system in the city? Did it go down the drain as well?

If only our newly-elected corporators spend time on finding answers to these questions instead of trying to figure out how to increase budgetary spending in their respective wards, the city might stand a better chance of dealing with both minor and major crisis. But then, public expectation from elected civic representatives is so low, probably nobody holds them responsible any longer for anything at all.