Santa was wearing a crisp white kurta–pyjama, standing next to the village Sarpanch at the inauguration of a beautiful, brand-new, concrete roadside drainage channel.
It was part of a routine village development scheme, completely unrelated to any disaster fund.
“Look at this progress, Banta!” Santa beamed, pointing to the smooth concrete.
“Pure development!”
“No disasters here.”
“We didn’t wait for a flood to build this.”
“This is clean, modern engineering!”
Banta walked to the end of the beautiful concrete channel.
He followed it with his eyes until he saw where it terminated: it poured its high-velocity water directly onto an unlined, steep, loose soil slope right above a residential cluster of huts.
Banta’s face dropped.
“Santa-ji, this is a beautiful piece of engineering, but it is an absolute disaster in terms of Risk Creation.”
“What?”
“How can a drain be a disaster?”
“It takes the water away from the road!” Santa protested.
“It takes the water away from the road and shoots it like a cannon directly into the soft underbelly of the hill!” Banta yelled.
“This is exactly what the narrative warns us about.”
“You think because this is a ‘routine developmental initiative’ and not a ‘Disaster Management‘ project, you don’t need to think about risk!”
“But nature doesn’t read your budget books, Santa.”
Santa looked from the end of the pipe to the loose mud below.
“Oye… I see it now.”
“When it rains heavily, the concrete will make the water move faster, and it will carve right through that loose dirt.”
“Exactly!” Banta said.
“You have introduced a massive slope instability parameter where none existed before.”
“You didn’t omit the Disaster Management Cycle; you just bypassed it entirely to manufacture a future landslide!”
“Disaster Risk Reduction or DRR means that even when you are building a routine road, a school, or a village drain, you must ask: Am I creating a new hazard downstream?”
“True development must find a way to make life easier without making it more dangerous.”
Santa quietly walked over to the supervisor.
“Listen… cancel the ribbon-cutting.”
“We need to extend this pipe all the way to the rocky riverbed below, and we need some perforated dewatering pipes on that slope immediately!”
संता – बंता की इस जुगलबन्दी से आज हमने क्या सीखा:-
- विकास–जनित जोखिम Development-Induced Risk:
- आपदा जोखिम आंकलन (Disaster Risk Assessment) की अनिवार्यता के आभाव में नियमित रुप से क्रियान्वित होने वाली विकास परियोजनाएं (सड़कें, नालियां, भवन) प्रायः नए जोखिम उत्पन्न करती हैं / Routine developmental projects (roads, drains, buildings) are the primary sites of new risk creation if they do not integrate a mandatory Disaster Risk Assessment.
- समग्र प्रणाली दृष्टिकोण / Holistic System View:
संता – बंता की यह जुगलबन्दी आपको कैसी लगी, कृपया हमें जरुर बताये
व
इस जुगलबन्दी को बेहतर बनाने के लिये अपने सुझाव अवश्य दें।
हमें हमेशा की तरह आपके सुझावों, प्रतिक्रियाओं व कटाक्षो का बेसब्री से इंतजार रहता हैं औरसच मानिये इसी के आधार पर हम अपने आप में, अपनी सोच व रचनात्मकता में सुधार करने कोप्रेरित होते हैं।
सो अच्छा – बुरा जैसा आपको महसूस हुवा हो, कमेंट जरुर करते रहें।
#SustainableDevelopment #RiskAssessment #Infrastructure #LandslideMitigation#UrbanPlanning #SantaBanta
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