Why is the Indian Economy still affected by Floods and Droughts?
Indian Economy is one of the biggest economies in the world where in we have surpassed the economy of UK recently and we are only behind USA, Japan and China. India spends most of its budget in Defence but hardly have we given much importance to one of the primary aspects of the country which is the rivers.
India is Land of Rivers. We have Ganga, Godavari, Krishna, Cauvery, Brahmaputra, Yamuna, Saraswati, Pamba, Tapti to name a few. Some of the rivers like Vaigai has already been extinct where as a latest report says even the so called "Ever Green Rivers" like Ganges were in the dangers of becoming extinct. Why am I talking about these things..?? It is certainly related to the above topic because most of these rivers flow independently before getting merged to the seas. Not only Indian climate but climates across the globe have been having problems because of Global Warming which has caused the changes in the climatic pattern which we have named it as "El Nino".
What El Nino does is, it brings rain during abnormal seasons where people were not prepared and at the same time stops the rain when it is suppose to be pouring and on both the cases since we are not prepared, we face the worst where in the case of floods, no expectations were set or people were alerted of flood danger and hence we lose lot of lives and property and similarly in case of failure of rain we face acute shortage of rain.
We should be prepared in both the cases to expect the unexpected and that is the only solution to solve these problems. Recently we have seen Bihar and Mumbai flooded affecting the daily life whereas states like Rajasthan hardly had seen any rain. Though it is hard to predict the danger because of unpredictable weather, we should be precautious enough to meet the unexpected. Keeping more food grains in stock (though Food Corporation of India-FCI claims it has enough stock of Grain till 2010) and also having emergency items like and bags, air boats can stop the trouble both the ways.
Another way of eradicating this is by connecting all the rivers through out the country. This was started by Late PM Shri Indira Gandhi and it has been a dream for all of us ever since. If this was executed at that point of time itself, it would have been done at the cost of few crores but now it is estimated that it would require at least 10 Lakh Crores to do this which is highly impossible considering our present economic situation since it would be 1/4th of Country's GDP(Gross Domestic Product).
We have seen lot of agitations happened recently between various states like TamilNadu,Karnataka,Andhra Pradesh with regards to sharing water with each other and that can be solved not through politics but only through action which is the unification of all rivers across the country which would enable us to reach maximum productivity be it in terms of Hydro Thermal Energy or Food Production. It is not IMPOSSIBLE unless we think it Impossible because the word impossible itself can be split as "I-M-POSSIBLE"
-Sarath Babu S
