Guwahati a ‘living hell’

Two big downpours in the past couple of days have turned the condition of Guwahati, the premier city of the Northeast, horrible. As the headline of a front-page news item in this newspaper on Saturday said, Guwahati has become a “living hell”. For this, however, the blame has been put on the lack of coordination among various government departments and agencies. The tragic accident in which a schoolgirl was crushed to death by a school bus not far from the State Secretariat on Thursday has been largely attributed to this lack of coordination among the various government agencies. The viral video of an e-rickshaw carrying schoolchildren overturning on the Hatigaon main road on Friday also points at this lack of coordination. One agency engaged in laying water pipelines has allegedly left the pits open after dumping the dug earth beside them, not bothering to fill up the pit after the pipe-laying work was done. While the duty of traffic police personnel is to ensure the smooth flow of traffic in the city, visuals doing the rounds in the past two days show that several police personnel have been busy trying to fill up a big pit dug apparently by the Guwahati Jal Board contractors. While a schoolgirl was run over by a school bus because of the alleged fault of the water pipe-llaying agency, the police took action against the school bus driver instead of taking to task the culprits who had dug the pit and left it open. This does not appear to be fair. The Kamrup (M) Deputy Commissioner has gone on record saying that several accidents have occurred in the city due to digging works by contractors engaged to lay water pipes. According to the Deputy Commissioner, the Public Works Department, Guwahati Jal Board, Power Grid Corporation, and Guwahati Smart City Ltd. are among the different agencies that have been pulled up for the irresponsible manner in which they have dug pits and holes on different roads of the city and left them open and vulnerable. That the agencies concerned, responsible for regularly desilting and cleaning the drains and the natural water channels of Guwahati city, have not done their work sincerely has already been proven by the heavy rains that lashed the city in the past couple of days. A section of citizens too have contributed to making Guwahati a “living hell” by dumping garbage in drains and water channels. These are a few factors that have posed a big challenge in making “Mission Flood-Free Guwahati” a grand success.