Please raise your hands to take responsibility

Rains bring Mumbai to a halt. Nothing new in this news. We hear this every year at least once, sometimes twice. There are some spots in the city which are prone to water-logging after every shower and brings unforeseen challenges to all in the city. 

This year we had a few days like that again. I happened to be returning to Mumbai after a business trip earlier this week and courtesy rains and a stuck aircraft on the main runway, a flight of two and a half hours was delayed by three hours. The ordeal did not end there. After landing in Mumbai , we were informed by the hapless pilot to the equally hapless passengers that the airfield was full of aircraft in view of the cascading effect and it may well take some time to find a parking slot. This some time finally became one hour and fifteen minutes and the fact that this was unfolding at the wee hours of the morning added to the trauma.

Heavy rains are nothing new, in a city whose average rainfall is 2metre in a season. Flight and train delays are also nothing new in these times. But the fact is that this airport , which is the busiest airport in the country , is continously operating at 120% of its capacity which no machine, mechanism or system is designed to sustain. And therefore , one incident of a runway closure brings the whole airport to its knees, the secondary runway being far too short to operate all the flights.

A new airport was conceived in 1997. In about 20 years , ie in Feb 2017 the bidder was finalised. The expected completion of this project is anybody's guess. We are sure by the time the work is completed , the infrastructure will be too less for the traffic load.

Successive governments of various political combinations in this country have ignored infrastructure, paying more attention to class, caste, creed, religion to keep people engaged. We aspire to be a modern nation but get stuck in the same loop of self destruction by procastination. Political parties have been talking big before elections and repeatedly under delivering. I would love to see the persons concerned raising their hands and taking responsibility for the lack of accountability that they have been demonstrating for years together.