Now that the waters in Jammu and Kashmir rivers have subsided after destroying huge areas in Jammu region and badly impacting scores of villages in south and central Kashmir, the government here should dedicate itself to the relief and rehabilitation of flood victims. The central government too should open up its coffers to assist the UT government as the later solely can’t rehabilitate this huge chunk of population. While pacing up the relief and rehabilitation efforts, the government here should start an honest exercise of soul searching and try to find out that what has gone wrong and where that even after 2014 devastating floods, it was not ready to tackle the situation this time.
A lot is being said about Rs 80,000 crore financial package announced by the Central government after the 2014 deluge for flood mitigation. Even the present Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah has questioned the utilization of this money. But let somebody remind him that he is duly elected CM and raising questions is not his job. His job is to find the answer to these questions and come up with concrete facts and figures and share them with the public. Let a high lever committee of officers of integrity be formed; let this committee dig deep into the issue and come up with the answers. The loopholes should be identified and if money was not used where it was to, accountability should be fixed and heads should role.
That said, the more serious task before the present government is to have a fool-proof and scientific flood mitigation plan in place. Here again the government should hire the services of experts within the country, even from outside the country, if need be, are come up with the action plan. Desilting of dredging of all main rivers should be the priority. As the reports have been emerging that no dredging of river Jhelum or its flood spill channel has been done years, the concerned government agencies should be taken to task. The exerts should guide the government about other flood mitigation efforts like freeing the water bodies of the encroachments and concentrating on the embankments of the rivers.
The government, while focussing on main rivers, should also pay some tributaries that add to the waters of these big rivers. These tributaries in entire Union Territory have been vandalized and as a result, one there are rain the roar with ferocity and, actually these tributaries, flood the main rivers. Earlier, local labour class would pay some fee to the geology and mining department and would extract stones, sand and bajri from these tributaries manually thus preserving the natural flow of these tributaries. Now big men are into it with big money to earn big money and are using big machines for extraction thus have destroyed these tributaries hampering the natural flow and therefore threatening floods, evert time it rains.