MINISTER for Water Resources Abdur Razzak has hinted at taking up this year's Hood havoc at the next JRC meet with India. Although the specific points to be mooted will be revealed later on, there is something that we would like to bring up rightaway. It seems to us that the 48-hour flood forecast mechanism that was agreed upon by India and Bangladesh replacing the previous 72-hour one has not quite worked, it has been a rather untimely flooding in West Bengal that has had a cascading effect of a run-off deluge through the south-western districts of our country. The suddenness of the flooding required that both sides communicated on a stepped up basis which obviously went abegging. Nevertheless, it is also worth investigating as to how much the Hood warning department of the Water Development Board is to blame for the failure to forecast the magnitude of the flood to come.

We have never tired of stressing the dire need for setting up a reliable forecast mechanism as a top priority concern in terms of disaster preparedness. That the climatic pattern is changing makes it all the more imperative that we lose no time in getting a thoroughly scientific and operatively a cross-border early warning system so that it proves fail-safe.

The violent clashes that we have observed this time in connection with attempts to relieve the water pressure by cutting passages through some embankment points could be avoided if we had the benefit of timely warnings. This would have enabled us to avoid the surprise or shock element, and what is even more to the point, we could stay ready with alternative routes for flushing out excess water, including perhaps having some pumping devices installed right on the embankment sites.

The government's relief operations have been wobbly. Its roars about having huge food stocks in hand are petering out into bleats as two ministers, the water resources minister and the state minister for relief, who on a tour of some of the flooded areas, encountered public commotion for the extremely meagre succour that had reached the affected people after so many days of waiting. They could only escape the embarrassment by assuring speedy delivery of adequate relief material to the distressed souls. It is a pity that in some places the folks received as little as 100 gram of foodgrains. We are not interested in the lamentation any more that those were not flood-prone areas so we were caught unawares by the calamity.'

AD AB has floated a request to the international community seeking its assistance to the flood victims. We want proper utilisation of whatever help is received in response to that call. Basically though, the government must not only rush with adequate relief materials to the affected areas but also make sure that these are delivered to the genuine flood victims.