Being prepared is half the battle
Nature isn’t being very kind to us these days but nature’s handiwork is being embellished to quite some effect by administrative negligence. Punjab has been engulfed by the dengue virus while Sindh has been deluged by flooding. In both these cases, the government is not exactly running on all thrusters. It’s a few cogs short of an efficiently running machine.
It might have been true that when either of these problems hit last year, the government could’ve pled not guilty on the basis of the fact that the unprecedented scale of the flooding disaster and the dengue epidemic would have stumped even the most proficient of administrations let alone our rackety one. But the problems of last year should’ve led the government to, at least, have a basic plan in place which they didn’t.
On the flooding issue, the NDMA has stated that the scale of the catastrophe is not much less than last year’s. 133 people have died, another 4.6 million ravaged by rains while 5.2 million acres have gone under. The administration is despatching relief goods as fast as it can but the fact remains that the negligence in repairs of dykes and the lack of timely evacuation of flood-prone areas has piled on to the problems. Now that the water is over one’s head, damage control is the only option. It isn’t going to get any easier as ominous predictions of more rain pour in.
In Punjab, too, the disaster isn’t any easier to deal with. The health machinery is in a fever pitch. Even though, government hospitals are, by and large, the only ones dispensing requisite care, they are nowhere equipped enough to deal with the influx of patients. Lack of coordination between different factions of the admin has exacerbated problems. The admin doesn’t have a grip on the gravity of the problem and needs to up its game.
Problems such as flash flooding and increase in vector-borne diseases will now be facts of life, courtesy global climate change. The only way to deal with them is to be prepared. The government needs to invest in preventive epidemiology, disaster risk management infrastructure and other such things if it is to have any chance of facing these problems. But with the devolution of the concerned health and agriculture departments (which in theory should increase the efficacy of dealing with these problems), things might get a lot worse administratively.