11-09-2018 (Important News Clippings)

11-09-2018 (Important News Clippings)

Man-made Devastation?
Kerala’s major dams filled up halfway through the monsoon, raising questions on dam management
TOI Editorials

A study for the water resources ministry, by a team from Central Water Commission, pointed out that many of Kerala’s major dams were filled to the brim even ahead of the torrential rain in August. This finding highlights again the state of dam management in India and its role in exacerbating the damage from floods. Kerala suffered devastation following extraordinary rainfall in the first three weeks of August. Floods were perhaps an inevitable outcome of this scale of precipitation. But what may not have been inevitable is the scale of devastation.

According to ecologist Madhav Gadgil, sensible dam management necessitated a gradual filling up of reservoirs as the monsoon progressed. In Kerala, halfway through the monsoon, the dams were filled to capacity. It rendered them ineffective in mitigating the impact of the August deluge. It speaks poorly of governance in India that questions about dam management arise every year when 164 of the 5,264 large dams are over a century old. Government has classified about 14% of India’s land area as flood prone. On average 7.169 million hectares are affected annually due to floods. This may be a recurring cycle. But repeating the same mistakes over and over again makes them doubly unacceptable.

Some of these mistakes have showed up in Kerala. Stone quarrying, some of it illegal, has led to siltation. Encroachment of floodplains and reclamation of wetlands have compounded the problem. During a performance audit of Tamil Nadu government’s role in mitigating the 2015 Chennai floods, CAG identified some of the standard mistakes. For example, allowing encroachments which shrunk storage capacity in Chennai is a governance failure – with devastating consequences – common to many states. With extreme weather events becoming more frequent, states need to ramp up governance standards. Else the scale of devastation can only get worse.