Saturday afternoon’s hailstorm and its impact on Guwahati should be considered by the Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) as a wake-up call as far as maintenance of the capital city’s drainage system is considered. A brief hailstorm and a number of localities of Guwahati suffered from water-logging, all because GMC has failed to perform one of its most important tasks of keeping the drains decongested. Yes, it is a fact that a sizeable section of citizens of Guwahati has been grossly irresponsible, a characteristic which this section has time and again proved by way of regularly – and shamelessly – dumping garbage in the drains and rivers/rivulets of the city. But then, while the GMC has probably never ever in its history of close to five decades made any attempt to educate the citizens about the ill-effects of dumping garbage in drains and rivers, its attempts to keep the drains flowing have also remained largely half-hearted. This is not a wild allegation or the outcome of any imagination but has been proved by Saturday’s hailstorm. Yes, Guwahati also needs a large number of public toilets, and the GMC has done a good job by establishing a few toilet clusters in the past couple of months. But then, rather than spending time and energy in setting up an art gallery under a fly-over, the primary focus should have been on the drainage system. Blaming the GMC alone, however, will be a kind of injustice. The blame should also be shared by a few other government agencies, which must include the Water Resources Department (which is supposed to ensure the smooth flow and outflow of the city’s water), the Forest department (which has grossly failed in its primary task of protecting the hills and wetlands of the city), the Public Works Department (which appears to be yet to understand properly how to construct roads in a city like Guwahati), the GMDA (which gives permission for construction of houses and buildings but does not seem to have any standard rule for maintaining a decent width of various categories of roads), to name a few.
