Floods in some regions of the country caused by both untimely and more-than-normal rainfall for two consecutive years have taken their toll of devastation, washing away dwellings of lakhs of people, causing landslides resulting in disappearance of bridges as well as stretches of highways connecting cities, submerging fields rendering loss of standing crops and uprooting residents from their ancestral homes. The economic worth of the damage done by rain fury has been put at 36,000 crore rupees in Karnataka alone. If the losses in the rest of the regions, mainly Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and North-Eastern States are reckoned, the economic value of damage may well exceed one trillion rupees. Rebuilding the dwellings, restoring civic amenities, keeping the spread of epidemics in check, putting people’s life back on track well before nature frowns again is a herculean task, beyond the imagination of people in regions such as the unaffected districts of Karnataka, particularly Mysuru, Mandya, Bengaluru and surroundings.
Civil society members, spared by nature’s fury, along with the country’s disaster management forces, including Army, Navy and Air Force have admirably risen to the occasion by rushing food, clothes, medicines and medical practitioners on an unprecedented scale, in an unmistakable testimony to the oft-quoted saying that the “World is one family.” If the humanitarian spirit can be sustained for all time, one cannot ask for more.
