Policy level changes are the need of the hour to tackle natural calamities like the flood in Uttarakhand, said Swapan Kumar Dutta, deputy director general (crop science), Indian Council of Agricultural Research. He warned that hilly areas in the country like Shimla and Darjeeling were at similar risk.
He was addressing the audience at the Founder’s Day celebrations of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University on Monday.
“Everybody knows that Brahmaputra overflows every year and floods occur regularly. Instead of blaming nature we have to strengthen our disaster management team. Proper policies have to be made at the earliest. I don’t believe that climate change is the sole reason behind the Uttarakhand tragedy. We need to learn from recurrences of disasters. From the Bengal famine to the Uttarakhand disaster, large numbers of people have died yet we have failed to learn. All these calamities could have been averted had there been a proper mechanism in place,” he said.
Dutta expressed happiness that more people were coming to study agriculture related disciplines. Minister for Agriculture S Damodaran, Vice-Chancellor of the university Ramasamy also spoke on the occasion.
