Now it seems like situation is completely out of control. More than 4 million people are affected by flood in Bihar and Indian government is doing nothing, just nothing. I saw a lot of people fighting for food, weeping, crying, dead bodies of animals. I had never ever seen such a situation like that before. People don’t have food, they don’t have roof, they don’t have medicines but there is no one to take care of them. People say that it will take at least 4 to 5 months for situation to be normal again, and after that diseases and poverty.
I saw people fighting for a packet of roasted garbanzo in a relief camp. There was more than 50 people fighting for one packet of garbanzo and finally no body could get it, all the garbanzo fell down on ground, people were walking over it and few people were still collecting as much as they could hoping that at least it will keep them alive. Government officers bring a packet of food and find that there are already hundreds of people waiting.
I saw a family who drowned their cow in flood just because they could not feed the cow any more. Being a Indian I could understand the situation when a family kill their cow. First of all they decorated the cow, did puja and then let it go in the flood water and within few minutes it drowned. All the family members were weeping and abusing government.
Indian government is investing huge money on Delhi Metro project, they are preparing for Commonwealth Games 2010, building new stadiums, building new roads which seems like huge investment but they don’t have enough money to save life of 4 million people of Bihar. I think they need to spend the same money on buying resources to save life not to show off by building Delhi Metro and preparing for Commonwealth Games.
If they give money to Biharis then this could happen again. If they spend money on the Metro and Games then the economy improves, and maybe next time money will not be an issue. It is sad when the government has to make decisions like this, but between business and welfare business usually wins.
You said that if government spends money on Metro and Games then they get their money back or even more. I agree with you but situation was different there. Do you know what was happening in Bihar? We had enough food packages or help to provide to the people in Bihar but we didn’t have enough resources to bring these help to the people. Army was distributing food packages given by Gujrat and other governments but they had only two helicopters which was not enough to reach to all the people. A lot of food packages got rotten because there were only two helicopters to carry the food and to take the people out of that hell.
Indian government could buy few new helicopters and provide help faster and then take the affected people out of the flood. This is what disturbed me a lot. There were lacs of people weeping and crying who wanted to go out of their place at any cost, but they could not do it because all the railway tracks were broken, no bus or other transportation.