As the political and military temperatures in India and Pakistan rose these past days over the brutal murder of tourists in Pahalgam in Kashmir, markets, educational institutions, businesses and offices in a handful of cities and towns across the Northeast closed in solidarity with the victims. There were also candlelight remembrances in Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, Aizawl in Mizoram, and Gangtok in Sikkim, the latter led by the chief minister. The editorials on the tragedy were sharp and the reporting extensive.
For a time, the focus of this region, so devastated in the past by violence and armed confrontations of many kinds, stayed with the pain of those who had suffered directly as well as that of the Kashmiris who, recovering from decades of bloodshed, found themselves in a familiar but unwanted place. The latter also responded with extraordinary courage with protest marches, candlelight vigils and a bandh, for the first time in 35 years, to oppose the terrorists.
But as with the cycle of life, local issues came to the fore within a few days in the Northeast. For one, the panchayat elections in Assam are on with fierce contests, campaigns, and occasional violence (in one incident, miscreants attacked the vehicle in which the Congress MP, Pradyut Bordoloi, and a state legislator were traveling). In another, demonstrating how ignorance about information can lead to emotional reaction, both the traditional and social media were seething with outrage at a gaffe about Assam by the National Council of Educational Research and Training. The organisation, which drafts curricula for schools nationwide, had, in a mathematics textbook for Class IV, shown a two-horned African rhino as the Indian rhinoceros, Assam’s state animal, which has one horn, and given an incorrect description alongside.
The text illustrated by an image of a two-horned rhino reads, “The Indian rhinoceros is found in the foothills of the Himalayas in Northeast India. Floods and medicinal value of their horns have led to a reduction in their population. In the early 1900s, their population was driven to near extinction with as little as 200 rhinoceroses. But with recent conservation measures, there are now around 4,000 rhinoceroses.”
The Union education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, and the chief minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, have been asked to ensure that the faux pas is corrected. Biplab Talukdar, a member of the Asian Rhino Specialist Group, an international conservation organisation, also slammed the NCERT for talking about the supposed medicinal value of the rhino horn, which, in fact, is matted hair. Scientists say it has no such properties but the horns command high prices in China and in Southeast Asia as a supposed aphrodisiac. The NCERT reference, Talukdar said, could normalise poaching in the minds of children.
Nature was also in the news in other ways: a few fierce bursts of rain brought life in Guwahati, the largest city of the region and its commercial and political hub, to a halt for a few hours, as it has often done in the past. Red, muddy storm water flowed down from the hills around Assam’s capital, mixed with overflowing drains, and turned main routes into water channels, causing extensive jams.
It’s a familiar experience for many. In one particularly massive flood last August, I was stuck for several hours and had to stay overnight in a modest hotel. Thousands were similarly held up; some reached home on foot late or in the early hours; others waited on high ground, such as flyovers, till the water receded.
A headline in The Assam Tribune, the region’s largest English language paper, declaimed after the recent downpour: “20 mm rain turns city streets into rivers”. Citizens vented their ire on social media. There were photos and videos of garbage floating on the water, cars ploughing through water-logged streets, and residents walking tentatively over broken sidewalks as the water lapped alongside.
Tackling the water overflow is a genuine challenge in a fast-growing city that is undergoing a massive transformation. It’s almost as if a new city is being built alongside the remnants of the old. There’s a surge of new businesses, office spaces, hospitals, malls and residential apartment complexes towering over older buildings of wood and plaster, mom and pop grocery stores as well as traditional markets, bakeries and chemists. New flyovers are being built to ease both current and future traffic.
Major infrastructural changes are being pushed through: for example, old water pipelines are being replaced with new ones laid under a loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency. Another project backed by JICA, which has prioritised the Northeast, is addressing Guwahati’s perennial problem of sewage. Heavy machinery is being used to declog sewage pipes and large pumps are also seen in action. The goal is to upgrade the city’s creaky infrastructure so that it can cope with the surge of investments, industry and travellers, including those who come for healthcare, that the state’s leaders anticipate.
JICA is also funding road-connectivity projects in Assam, Mizoram and Meghalaya as part of an Indo-Japan initiative going back several years that supports the Act East Policy of linking the landlocked region with its neighbours and, eventually, with Southeast Asia. This effort, however, has been slowed, if not stopped, by the civil war in Myanmar next door and the frosty relations of the new regime in Dhaka with New Delhi.
The old problems remain, at least for now. They are caused by a combination of factors, including the lack of coordination among agencies, contractual negligence, and inattention to detail. Thus, the state minister handling urban affairs had declared in March that debris from desiltation of city drains, an ongoing process, would be removed by the month-end. A battery of monitoring committees had been set up, he said, to keep an eye on things. In many places, however, the muck was not removed from the side of the drains. The metro’s district commissioner recently quoted monitoring committees that said that at times the silt stayed uncleared for over 24 hours — meaning that if the rains hit, the cleared muck would flow back into the system. After the fresh surge of rain, more floods, jams and public outrage, the district commissioner said that contractors and agencies involved in the desilting process would face legal action if they did not act quickly.
Let’s see if that works.
Sanjoy Hazarika is a writer who specialises on the Northeast and travels extensively in the region