Monsoon woes & preventive measures: It’s all stereotype in Guwahati

GUWAHATI, Sept 1: Monsoon never revisits Guwahati alone. It makes city hills deathtraps, causes siltation and water-logging, besides making the administration and the public to be on their toes. However, everything is back to square one as and when the monsoon is over. This is Guwahati’s own way of facing landslide that has claimed 13 lives till July 2018 from 2014.

One can hardly believe that as many as 366 areas in the hills in and around Guwahati have been identified as landslide-prone. This is the figure given by the Assam State Disaster Management Authority (ASDMA) after conducting a survey way back in 2016. Houses are seen to have sprung up atop hills and hillsides legally or illegally in the city. The preventive measures being taken are also stereotyped ones – the district administration serving notices to the residents in landslide-prone areas asking them to vacate and the residing defying the orders risking their life and limb. Such residents are also availing all government facilities like power and water supply. This is not all. They even erect schools, temples, masjids etc., in such vulnerable areas atop hills and hillsides. They aggravate the situation by resorting to earth-cutting in hills – leading to siltation, choking of drains and water-logging. Nothing tangible has been done to mitigate the problem as yet since the mapping of the landslide-prone areas in the city by the ASDMA in 2016. Some of the landslide-prone areas in the city are Jorabat, Sunsali, Fatasil Ambari, Sarania, Maligaon, Kharguli etc.

The district administration says that it serves notices asking residents in vulnerable areas to vacate their houses. However, the residents continue to defy the notices. They are ready to risk their life and limb. But, when there are disasters like landslides, the public squarely blame it on the district administration for not doing what it ought to. Even when the district administration goes all out for eviction drives in such landslide-prone areas, it has to face opposition of all sorts from the public and NGOs as well. Interwoven with human rights, the entire matter becomes messy.

The district administration says that it can only appeal to the public in the landslide-prone areas to vacate their houses to get out of the mess. What it wants the most is public support while carrying out the eviction drives in vulnerable areas. Now the district authority is going to carry out an eviction drive from Jorabat-Byrnihat, a stretch infamous for encroachment of roadside drains in the city bordering Meghalaya.