It has been a week now, the dead body of one more victim who drowned in boat capsize tragedy in Gandbal, Batwara Srinagar is yet to be fished out. Nine people died after a boat ferrying school children and their parents drowned in Jehlum river early in the morning descending a pall of gloom across the city. After strenuous efforts from the experts and other officials with poor equipment in hand, eight bodies have been retrieved so far while one body is still missing.
This tragedy has yet again set the reminder of how our governance is poor and people in the helm of affairs show no concern to mitigate the day-to-day sufferings of people. It has been only after this horrible tragedy that the officials from the Roads and Building department assured the people that the bridge would be completed in the next two months.
However, it is yet to be seen if the assurance was made only to pacify the public anger or really, they felt the magnitude of this tragedy which consumed innocent lives. The heaviest coffins in the world are those when elderly parents take coffins on the shoulders of their children.
There is no need to describe the painful scenes that the hamlet of Gandbal went through where a mother along with two young children was lowered in the same grave. The magnitude of tragedy would haunt the living husband and father who lost this whole family in this incident. Shamelessly, even the politicians who have been in power for decades left no chance to seize an opportunity and visited the victim families and shed crocodile tears.
They too are responsible for this tragedy for their failure in building this only bridge to connect the hamlet with the rest of the city. Roads, water and electricity as per the Supreme Court ruling are the basic necessities of life and no citizen of the country can be deprived of such basic facilities. But in Kashmir, the politics is all about exploiting people for decades for the same reasons.
And the Gandbal episode is yet another chapter in this long listing of tragedies inflicted upon people due to poor or negligent governance. The incident of boat capsizing can genuinely be attributed to the poor governance, though there is no hope that justice would ever prevail.
The government must formulate the policy and devise a mechanism where such developmental works are prioritized that can minimize such incidents and save precious lives. Every life matter and government must own the responsibility of its failure and equally ensure no such incidents ever happens due to its negligence.
