Flood control preparedness exposed again

The flood scare in towns and villages of North and South Kashmir districts shows that Jammu & Kashmir government has not learnt any lessons from the experiences of 2014 devastating floods that washed away hundreds of residential and commercial structures in Kashmir valley. So the state government can be rightly blamed for not improved flood management plans despite having everything down on paper. The failure of flood management plans of the state government endorses the general impressing brewing among the people that less than 5% of what is written on official documents or discussed at meetings by planners and administrators is implemented on ground . The result is faulty execution of flood management operations in the state and more so in Kashmir valley where flood scare brings gloom to populations in low lying areas year after year and month after month. Though the government has been claiming much about the flood management plans but the Irrigation & Flood Control (I&FC) department fail to carry out the flood protection operations till the populations in low lying areas are totally inundated. Today when dozens of villages and major towns in North and South Kashmir districts were inundated the preparedness of Jammu and Kashmir’s own disaster response force was exposed as officials tasked the job of rescue and relief operations went missing. What could the hapless people do with empty hands in flooded areas when the government did not provide them the required wherewithal like boats or safety jackets for rescue operations. The bigger cause for the occurrence and re-occurrence of floods in Kashmir is the government’s inability to remove the encroachments in and around water bodies .
The government was told in 2014 that unless the flood basins which stand encroached upon, are restored to cater to the surplus flow besides taking some other measures, the low lying areas will continue to be under the threat during major floods but the inability of the government to remove encroachments in and around water bodies is increasing becoming the major cause of floods in both rural and urban areas of Kashmir valley. The Irrigation and Flood Control (I&FC) department does not have even the required man power to carry out the flood management operations in the time of crisis and government has to understand that it can’t outsource the rescue operations to any private agency the time when the threat of flood looms large over the populations in low lying areas. The Irrigation & Flood Control department has to ensure the availability of skilled manpower for keeping itself always in a state of preparedness for carrying out the flood management operations in all the flood prone areas of the state.