Primary Motifs: Deserving our tomorrow

Monalisa Changkija

Early July, as elsewhere across the region, Nagaland too saw heavy rains that not only flooded several parts of Dimapur including colonies but also caused floods in the hilly capital city of Kohima. While it is tempting to say that these rains were “unprecedented”, “the heaviest so far”, “never seen before”, and the like, one wouldn’t give in to the temptation because till the 1990s and possibly the early 2000s, the monsoon rains didn’t hold back when they poured, not least in Nagaland’s low-laying areas.

As for Kohima and other hilly areas, besides this time of the year, rains would anyway pour down ceaselessly almost throughout the year either in drizzles or moderately. But floods in Kohima? Not so shocking or even surprising because of the much clogged drainage system in this capital city, which was categorised as “Smart City” a few years ago and a lot of hullabaloo was made of it. Obviously, everyone is asking what happened to the crores allotted for this Smart City.

The early July heavy rains also caused numerous landslides, destroyed roads, houses, paddy fields and crops across Nagaland, per news reports. Roads were turned into rivers but the hilly terrain provided outlet for the rain water to flow downhill. That didn’t happen in Kohima town early this month because there is no or little space for flooded water to flow downhill as such space have been built over or the drain were clogged with garbage to allow the rain water to escape.

At such times of natural and other disasters, human beings are wont to apportion blame on someone or something. So, when Kohima and particularly Dimapur were facing the worst of these floods and neighbourhoods were inundated rendering the residents homeless and helpless, accusations, allegations, blaming and shaming were flying hard and thick. As always in Nagaland, the people are blamed for all woes so not surprisingly blamed for constructions over drains and every possible piece of land. The blamers forgot who issued land pattas and the numerous town planning, urban building laws, etc., and their implementation thereof. The aftermath of the torrential rains early this month was a result of everything the people and Government of Nagaland did and/or didn’t do mindlessly and myopically. We can either focus on that or take precautionary and remedial recourse because we increasingly face unprecedented climate change impacting our weather systems.  

Now, while we aspire to live ‘developed’ lives in clean cities, fact is we are neither clean nor developed. We still live lives in our urban areas that are not too far distant from our old ways in the villages. Ironically, in the past few decades our villages have become so much cleaner and disciplined not simply because of increased educational outreach and media and technology reach consequently more exposure to the outside world but because the effective and efficient traditional system of village governance continues without compromise. Ultimately, it is preparedness of governance based on scientific knowledge and the political will in terms of policy revisit and recalibration. Things are no longer the same therefore we cannot go on with the same old ways. Simply pouring in funds into Band-Aid measures after the fact will not mitigate problems. Because large parts of the Northeast region have become increasingly prone to climate change and States like Nagaland are seeing debilitating disasters such as floods, landslides and landslips more and more every year, our Governments need to make State and region-specific policies.