West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the recent floods in West Bengal, emphasising that the annual problem of floods in south Bengal requires short-term and long-term measures.
In a four-page letter released by Government of West Bengal on Wednesday, Ms. Banerjee has sought Mr. Modi’s “immediate intervention so that the concerned Ministry of the Government of India is requested to engage with Governments of West Bengal and Jharkhand and the authorities of DVC (Damodar Valley Corporation) to help in arriving at a permanent solution to this problem of our State occurring year after year”.
Eight districts of West Bengal were affected by the floods last week and about 5 lakh people had to be evacuated. The improvement in the weather had resulted in an improvement of the situation.
“This is the second time in this monsoon period, within a short span of 3/4 months, that due to excessive discharge lakhs and lakhs of people in West Bengal have been marooned, displaced from their homes and forced to stay in relief shelters accompanied by loss of life and property,” Ms. Banerjee said in the letter dated October 5.
She added that Government of West Bengal had to bear the brunt of the unplanned discharge by the DVC and to pay for the “inadequacy and structural deficiency of DVC management”. The Chief Minister impressed that her government had to “compensate for the damages caused to a vast multitude of people in the districts of south Bengal from its own meagre resources, while adequate funds are not made available by Government of India/ NDRF (National Disaster Response Force)”.
The West Bengal Chief Minister, who visited the flood affected areas of the State last week, said that the annual problem “requires short-term and long-term measures so that the sufferings of the people are mitigated and the national loss in terms of loss of life and property is avoided”.
Blaming the “uncontrolled and unplanned discharge of water from DVC dams at Panchet and Maithon”, she said pointed out that she had written a letter to the Prime Minister on the same issue on August 4, to which there had been no response from the Government of India.
“Unless the Government of India addresses the basic underlying structural and managerial issues both on a short term and on a long-term basis, the disasters will continue unmitigated in our lower riparian State,” she said, adding that the issue affects millions of lives and Centre should “get into some serious actions”.
On several occasions in the past, and also in the letter, Ms. Banerjee has described the floods as “man-made”.
The Bharatiya Janata Party leadership has said that Ms. Banerjee’s government had failed to address the issues in the past 10 years and was “blaming Centre to hide the incompetency of her government”.
