The citizens of Shillong are living through too much trouble and to such an extent that they have too little time to think of what’s going on in their lives. They suffer at the same time from bad roads, vicious stray dogs, hunger and colic pains, and eerie patches on their cheeks – the latter a result of the high UV rays under the clear and bright sunny skies, and therefore they have become sickly and no matter how much they eat and exercise they fill the hospitals and clinics and doctors are having a heyday prescribing Pantop and Rantac. Anyone in Shillong who says, “I am living a healthy life free from gastric problems” is an ass and is lying.
I have no wish to establish guilt or foul play or lack of any play at all in the recent expose made by the FSSAI (Food Safety and Standardisation Authority of India) authorities that 44 localities in Shillong are being provided with unsafe drinking water. Social Media is overloaded with comments on this unethical situation and the horrendous failure of the State government in providing the people with the most basic requirement of any society. Being a basic necessity one tends to take for granted that the State is providing its people safe and clean drinking water…but after this outpouring I have kept a poster in a prominent place that spells out, “NEVER TAKE ANYTHING FOR GRANTED ANYMORE.”
And along with this poster all I can do at this stage is to offer a little advice to those whose duty it is to provide safe drinking water to the citizens: “if you want to do that which is right for the citizens and maintain your honour and your worth, then please test the water before you release it to the citizens.” Better give nothing than give something harmful. Or better still, state your inability and make it clear to one and all that the water provided by the authorities is “not for drinking purposes.” Thereafter we can revise the contract we the people have entered into with the people who we have entrusted with water supply. Place this sense of duty at the head of your morality and at every door in your workplace.
The duty of the officials serving in the Municipality and in the Public Health Departments and any other Department entrusted with providing water to the citizens is to provide the citizens with clean and safe drinking water and we the citizens have a right to demand for it. We acquired this right by deeming them to be capable of doing so and so we the people contracted them to give us good clean safe drinking water for a handsome salary that we pay them – it’s a system of give and take which is behind every person who joins government service, and any party that fails to fulfill their part of the contract is liable to lose the right to the contracted promise and so if they give us impure water we have the right to cut off their salary and let them face the immanent retribution for failure to fulfill that contracted promise. It’s as plain and simple as that.
The water in the water sources of Shillong is good…of that I am sure because no locality that handles its own water needs is mentioned in that embarrassing list. Therefore one can only assume that something is happening between the source and the delivery point, since the change must be taking place somewhere along the line, a change that somehow wears off the purity or even worse that adds all the bad that the consumer is receiving. Truly someone somewhere is a master at inverse alchemy, a master at devaluating the most valuable thing we have in this hill station.
It is time to reach out for another experiment in the delivery system of water otherwise I am afraid we will keep on attaining the opposite of what we seek, and it will only go from bad to worse – and in this aspect the government has become pretty professional – it will suggest a privatization of the water supply and distribution system. Perhaps by changing the delivery system, or at least some aspect in the delivery system, those responsible will once again win bit by bit the support of the people that matter most in the process. But then that can only be when these people that matter see the changes that have been made and not experience, as hitherto, that nauseating feeling that “we are drinking acid.”
Sad but true, in the great majority in Shillong, the intellect has become a clumsy rusted piece of machinery that is difficult to start, and when they want to get it operational they say, “seriously speaking” hoping that by saying so they will get this onerous machinery to think well once again.
It is right and normal that a certain degree of power is given and preserved by the officers in every Department from top to bottom, and a diminution or an increase in any way is resisted, but when the power is proved to have been profoundly ignored or broken as can be inferred when citizens are not being provided with safe and clean drinking water – and nothing is being done against those that are responsible – the rights of the employees in the concerned Departments cease, and this leads to the other party, the citizens, becoming a great deal more powerful. The rights of the employees cease for them, at least in the form in which they have so far been conceded. And on the part of the concerned Departments, it is only natural that every employee will defend their cause in the entire imbroglio with the defence that they are not singly responsible for what has happened; and that is a fair statement.
The justification is based on the degree of power the person possesses in the entire affair, which is the statutory nature of any democratic set up. Then the question arises, is there someone who has been entrusted with testing the water from time to time and submitting the reports to the authorities? Most likely not and so no one will sink in the immediate, at least for a short while, but someone must sink if the people are to be prevented from raising a greater hue and cry and a public display of their disgust. And the only one that can carry the sins of the entire government in this affair is the Minister i/c of providing water to the people from the source to home i.e. the Minister i/c Public Health Engineering Department and/or Municipal/Urban Affairs.
And so if we hear of a reshuffling in the Ministry in the coming days we shouldn’t be surprised, or if we hear that a privatisation of the distribution system is being considered we should reflect and open with, ‘seriously speaking’ on the strange things that happen when a calamity arises – the government does not cleanse the system, no atonement is made, on the contrary an even greater pollution is underway.
