Why is it when the Meteorological department predicts rain, it turns out to be a sunny day and when they ask us to leave the umbrellas and safely predict sunny day, it rains cats and dogs. Why the predictions often are go astray? When we click a message, it lands in somebody’s computer in the remote corner of America in seconds. When Science has advanced, discoveries have overtaken old discoveries, Aryabhatta satellites circle around the world high up in the sky, sending terrestrial pictures which should make the Met department to predict the cloudy weather, thunderstorms, the devastating fury of the winds, the accurate direction of the winds, its pace, the depressions in the bay, accurate to cent percent even to the decimals. No Government weather forecasting department forecast the tsunami correctly but gave all sorts of stories about the tsunami once it destroyed, ravaged, and devoured scores of human beings.
Presently most of the forecasts are done using Doppler radar (costing around Rs 20 Cr), a crucial piece of equipment in weather predictions. Doppler radar system is capable of predicting the weather for a 400 Km radius. This system is used to predict rain, thunder showers, temperature, wind speed, atmospheric pressure. Like Government hospitals which have scan machines having high cost, lying unused, though donated by philanthropists because the Government is yet to appoint trained officials to man them, the Dopler radars purchased for many important cities are lying idle at Delhi for the last 6 years because the concerned State Governments has not provided a piece of land for its installation and location. What a pity? We have CAG writing obstructive comments, and Parliamentary Committees writing scathing reports which are placed in Parliament, yet our inefficient bureaucracy remain unmoved. They move at the pace of the bullock cart, and organize a fight for nothing holding the whole country to ransom in the name of collective protest. .
The Doppler radar is a compulsory equipment for every IMD headquarters. It is an important scientific aid to predict the vagaries of the weather correctly. But how many of the State Governments have provided the IMD with land so that the Doppler could be properly installed. The Director of meteorology has little clout, and the Ministry of Science and Technology requires a T N Seshan to wake up the Rip Van Winkle out of slumber. So callous, so faint, so powerless is this department.
Further, there is no co-ordination between the Centre and the state government. The Director of Meteorology hardly gets an audience with the Chief Minsiter of a state, much less has clout to meet the Chief Secretary. When we have state Chief Ministers’ Review with the prime minister, when the Dy Chairman of the Planning Commissioner as powerful as Dr Montek Singh Aluwaliah, can sing sweet songs about the growth rate based on the Plans authored by it, and seldom able to achieve it, why can’t these top people at the helm of Government do simple things which do not require any 2/3rd of voting in Parliament and more than half of the states to approve it, and which does not require Doctorate degrees for implementing it. The financial outlay is rather negligible compared to the colossal expenditure planned for holding the Commonwealth games, where various financial and implementation irregularities have been noticed?
Dept of meteorology which do not get government land to install Doppler have to base their forecasts on satellite data uploaded from Delhi. Some enthusiastic Chief Minister’s are keen on putting up automatic barometers to check temperature and rain gauges for forecasting rain, investing Crores of Rupees, when they are unable to provide a little land to install Doppler radar. And we talk about agricultural growth to achive 4% in theory, when in practice it has just been able to grow (+) 0.20%. Crores of Rupees have been spent on literature, but the essentials are not in the book mark of the rulers of to
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