Bengal At Peril, Naturally

Bengal is staring at all round environmental disaster, from north to south. But nobody except some environmentalists is concerned

- Diptendra Raychaudhuri

IT was early morning of the first day of August. Suddenly, a guard noticed a large crack on NH 117, at a distance of barely ten metres from Ganga, at Diamond Harbour, the last important town of South Bengal on the left bank of the river. The locals acted with alacrity to stop the traffic on the road. Within minutes, the crack widened, and on a stretch of about 80 metres, half of the road caved in.

It did not happen on a day of heavy rains. In fact, rains are playing truant in South Bengal this year, encouraging chats on global warming and ‘extreme weather conditions’. After the subsidence, the politicians started their regular blame game. The heavyweight TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee blamed it on the erosion of Ganga, while CPI(M) bigwig Sujan Chakrabarty identified beautification work on the river bank as the culprit. A few Calcutta papers did not report the incident of subsidence on page one the next day. It was business as usual.

The incident should have acted as an eye-opener. But no one was interested to look at the grim bigger picture that points at a large-scale environmental disaster. We have all the information, but we love to treat those as disparate pieces.