Grievances Galore

Things are turning awful and awry for the people of Hyderabad, with frequent power cuts, the Bolakpur contaminated water deaths, Fire at Secretariat and so on. As it is, Congress is accused of umpteen fallacies and is meted out destructive criticism and the spawning of the above events only made matters worse.

Who is to be blamed? Is it right to blame the government or the concerned authorities of the respective departments who are showing slack in fixing things faster? I’m averse to power cuts because that means waste of time for me. No Power cut, No productivity. A person is left with nothing to do absolutely. I wonder how people lived in days when electricity was not invented. I can’t work because my Laptop will be running out of battery, the same with T.V, Cell phone and PC. I don’t mind climbing 5 floors to my apartment as I’m a fitness freak. But definitely not when I just return from work at 10 pm and have the 3kg Laptop to carry. Last Monday I had to wait for an hour downstairs until the power was on. The newspapers and TV read that it’s because the underground cable has been soiled and need to be fixed; and people have to put up with it for about a week. It’s a day more than week and the power cuts are still frequent. The hours are odd and random and range between 4 to 6 hours a day. I wonder how long it takes to fix it. People smugly acquiesce the fact that government bodies are slack and take it in their stride but it’s high time the government must ask these authorities to beef up their ‘speed-of-fixing’ things. I wonder if it really takes a week to fix it.

The recent contaminated water deaths in Bolakpur found its place under the genre of tragedy. I cannot even quote the numbers because neither the government nor the press is willing to give the precise numbers. It’s a strategy the government and press use to report things. They always cut off a ‘zero’ is what my mam told us when we were studying civics in intermediate. A noted local newspaper pegged the death toll at ‘6’ when there were about 20 to 30 who died and around 300 who were injured. It’s only after a certain number of deaths, do the authorities wake up to it. This is sheer delinquency on the respective authority’s part. The histrionics and drama of experts from water and nutrition department unravel now, very much after the deaths. And as ever, it’s always the poor who are hit tremendously. Apparently they can’t demand accountability from the government because of their illiteracy and poverty. One can comprehend their plight, when they drink water despite its foul smell and change in the colour from colorless to tones of orange and red. The laxity of the authorities: the drinking water pipe got concocted with the sewage pipe.

A fire broke out in secretariat last Wednesday. Instead of rationalizing the reasons that led to it, the opposition parties say it is the conspiracy of congress to gut some files and save their asses. The fire actually broke out on account of a short circuit in a computer cable. The next day, the newspaper reads no attempts to gut the files. What rot? Can somebody elucidate what’s happening?

The grievances of the commoner just seem to be perpetual; from power cuts, to open manholes, to grave deaths that can be averted by driving down delinquency, to badly constructed fly overs that leads to its eventual collapse and so on. Instead, of correcting these defects, the government and all parties are in haste to cash in only votes, votes and votes!