Uttrakhand Disaster – What Technology could have done and saved!

The flood hit Uttrakhand has just not evolved from the havoc of rain and the people are fighting for their life day and night. The nightmarish situation is just worsening day by day and has paralysed the communication, transportation network completely. In this report, ITPV talks about the lack of better disaster management capabilities and technology that IT companies challenge and goes gaga about at a time when it was most needed to save the lives of many.

The recent cloud burst and heavy rains, India’s Himalayan state of Uttarakhand created a nightmarish situation in just about 20 hours. Water played with the lives of commoners, landslides demolished homes, hotels, took away people, cars, buses and demolished the roads and with it paralyzed the transportation network as well. As a result many places were cut off from the country and people were on their own stranded, as if left to die in solitude!

All this happened at a time when technology seems to be controlling everything, from the way we move around to the way we behave and communicate vehemently. How could this happen? Or did the government let this happen? It may take thousands of crores of rupees and years before normalcy can be restored in the region.

Yes of course, ecological equilibrium is very important. Rampant growth of concrete and cutting down of trees, have not helped the nature at all. Environment, ecology and geology are an integral part of the whole natural process. In such situation, the course of any river is determined by the terrain and gradient of the river and when encountered by a hitch, the river changes its course and naturally takes away anything that comes in between.

This has been happening for many centuries now and mankind if quite used to it. The only thing which can control all this is the prior knowledge of such phenomenon and hence issuance of a warning system to the general public. This is where the real issue lies in India.

On the technology leading front, India has been on the global IT and services engineering and re-engineering map for quite some time now, helping governments and organizations worldwide implement science and technology driven solutions for bettering their citizen services, utility operations and weather forecasts.

Hence, India’s IT prowess is quite well known and India’s IT companies take pride in technology implementation and innovation. Additionally India has an impressive set of Remote Sensing Satellites in the world and there are many times when other countries take help from India when it comes to placing their satellites on the orbit. However, all this has not helped us in any way to be able to save lives. Lack of better disaster management capabilities are to be blamed here.

Ironically, India is home to most of the global IT service providers and while a lot of US, Europe and other continental IT work is being done from various big and small IT shops here in India, it is still not clear why the same IT capabilities cannot be applied on the home ground where it is needed the most.

For instance, Indian companies are providing a lot of their capabilities to public utilities and driving intelligence into providing precise weather forecasts for a lot of European organisations, all this could easily be done for local states as well.

Why it is not done here is a big question now?

While mountain ranges in the Europe and US are well equipped with seismology driven equipment, all this is missing from our very own Himalayan ranges. And additionally there is very little being done in the name of disaster management. On the communications front, there is almost nothing if the local service provider network fails on the hills, usually the best way to incorporate resiliency would be to have alternate way and means of communication like the Point to Point or P2P based communication that works on different and rugged frequency and has special advantage for usage on difficult terrain.

All is surely easier said than done but the government must start thinking on these lines to utilise the best of technology and enable better disaster management techniques on larger scale. And of course it is ironic to say that better communications infrastructure clubbed with better intelligence could have saved many lives that are lost in the Uttrakhand region.