For the past one week, it has been the same story every day. It has been raining, pouring, making the city of Delhi a bigger mess than it was the previous day. The newspapers are full of photographs the following morning telling us the hell others have been going through too. Immediate problems beget immediate reactions. The civic bodies are to blame for the mess, we are told. And the blame game goes on.
Now, now, tell us something new, will you? While it is a fait accompli that the metropolitan disorder one has to wade through is only a clinical manifestation of the ineptitude of the Delhi government and its lethargic and corrupt civic agencies, it is a recorded fact that this has been the wettest August that the capital city has seen in 15 years.
All those who had encroached on to the Yamuna bed, goaded by political parties left, right and centre, are being evacuated even as I write this. The river, which remains a virtual, filthy rivulet for the better part of the year, has been flowing 22 cm over the danger mark when reports last came in. All you now need for the disorder to turn into pandemonium is for floodwaters to trickle into the city. In all likelihood, it won’t. But then, you never know with rains.
And if you have lived in this city for long, you would also know that historically Delhi never got rains as much as, say, the Malabar coast does. Or did. The city was never built to take in so much of the rains. And now, you can’t do much about improving drainage systems.
Then again, while the rains and the consequent bedlam are all that are reflected in the news media, it is surprising that few are talking of shift in climate patterns that Delhi has been witness to. Climate sceptics are quite likely to jump at this argument contending that it never rains the same amount every year. What they won’t tell you is that for the last few years Delhi has been seeing the kind of monsoonal rains it did not see, as it were, 50 years ago.
Talking heavy about climate change to ordinary people does not make sense. Not certainly when you look at climate change in isolation. You need to pin the reason and reasoning down to something that affects the daily lives of common people. These Delhi rains, for instance.
While we are not hearing much about the impact of climate change on these weather conditions, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has stirred up some debate in the US by linking recent natural disasters to climate change. She talked particularly of the devastating floods in Pakistan and the ravaging forest fires in Russia. The climate data chief of the World Meteorological Organisation has been quoted saying it's "too early to point to a human fingerprint" behind the recent disasters but climate change may be "exacerbating the intensity" of them.
So if you are a Delhiite and have been spending a few hours in traffic snarls here and there, you know who to blame for those exasperating jams. As for the rains, attribute it to climate change.
