Now for some local issues. Every year India goes through this conversation. And yet every year it happens again. For years, the drought and flood management has simply left out the people at the bottom rung of the ladder. They are left to wading in the water or waiting helplessly on rooftops fearing that the roof would collapse.
During drought, the dams store too much water and turn the deltas into salty marshes and during floods another thing happens. The dams in Karnataka and the Srisalam Dam in Andhra Pradesh started to store too much water without anticipating heavy inflows. As a result, a major town-Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh is now mostly underwater. Added to this the danger of a threat to the structural integrity of the Srisalam and Nagarjunsagar Dams not to mention the flooding of their power houses. What were the upstream engineers and flow monitors doing? Why wasn’t the water released in steps so as to not increase the water level too much AND not submerging the backwaters. And what happened to all those satellite imagery. The ISRO chairman was pretending that the military intended RISAT-2 had civilian uses to avoid flood damage. Well its time to deliver on the ruse. This is where we need you.
All fault doesn’t lie with the irrigation departments. Time and time again, there have beeen warnings to remove the settlements from the river bed which have gone unheeded. That place belongs to the river and unless u’re a fish or other water creature u don’t live there period.
Its time to buck up coz the loss of lives to a controlled river system is simply unacceptable.