No hollow sloganeering, please!
The winter in Kashmir this year—unlike winters experienced by the people in the recent past—has been harshest in many ways. In a certain sense, it has been unprecedented. The considerable dip in both minimum and maximum temperatures aside, the disruptions caused by the widespread January 3 snowfall have been terrible, to say the least. If anything was grotesquely troublesome for the people at large, it is the freezing of water pipes and taps for the most part of the 40-day tenure of ‘Chilai Kalan’, the harshest winter period in Kashmir beginning December 21. And this chilling scenario wasn’t unique to the Valley’s rural belts, especially those in its southern parts that saw very heavy snowfall, but across the summer capital Srinagar too.
If there’s anything where the UT administration is perceived to have done well this year, it is ensuring a fairly much better power supply than the one seen in the preceding winters. With the rest of the amenities and services, it has been a poor show on the ground, especially with regard to clearing roads of snow in time. While the scenario in Kashmir’s countless rural areas continues to be grim vis-à-vis snow clearance, the Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) exhibited gross callousness and apathy in the city inhabited by more than 1.5 million people. It failed to make its presence felt even weeks after the snowfall, except at a few pockets where mobile cameras appeared to be pre-installed to paint a rosy picture of the otherwise huge show of failure. And, in one of the reports in a national online news portal, the city’s mayor minced no words in putting the blame on lack of snow clearing machines with the SMC—something that should have been taken care of by his Corporation much ahead of the start of the winter season. If civic authorities haven’t invested in keeping such machines available for use in winters, the mayor must take responsibility for this failure. He has been previously also associated with the SMC to take a call on such matters. Why let people suffer for the failure at official levels?
Another terrible disruption—this continues unabated in Kashmir over the years—is the frequent closure of the Srinagar-Jammu national highway, and disruption of flights at the Srinagar “International” Airport. While the completion of highway expansion work has missed several deadlines over the years, hardly any effort is being made to make the 82-km-long Mughal Road—connecting Kashmir with Poonch district in Jammu region via southern Shopian district in the Valley—an all-weather route with the construction of tunnels at some vulnerable spots. This is despite several promises being made to people that the Mughal Road will be constructed as an alternative all-weather route to Kashmir, where the Srinagar-Jammu national highway remains closed for the most part of the winter season owing to frequent landslides and shooting stones. Same is the case with Srinagar Airport, where no effort is being made to install a CAT-II Instrumentation Landing System (ILS) to enable operation of flights in low visibility conditions.
Development must not appear to be a mere slogan in Kashmir. It must be felt by the people on the ground. Any talk of development or concepts like ‘Smart City’ will be taken seriously only if people get the amenities and services that will alleviate their sufferings. If the lapses at official levels this winter are not fixed on priority, the coming winters would only expose the development talk as hollow and fake. And that is the last thing a responsible government can afford.
