In the attached article published in "Current Science" magazine, Mr Chetan Pandit, a water resources engineer analyses civil society reactions in the media to flood events like the Bihar floods of 2008 and finds them wanting. Mr. Pandit posits that civil society orgs orgs and people are all too ready to take convenient positions eg. the cause of the floods is man's interference, technology based flood management paradigms are wrong and so on. Engineers are typically slow to react as they take time to study the facts and in the case of government technocrats and engineers, they are usually restricted from commenting freely. The net result is lack of healthy debate in the media, which ends up being loaded by one-sided anti-government and anti-technology commentary.
While the article was not written in the context of the current floods in South India, it has been published at a topical time by co-incidence.
We welcome a rebuttal of some of Mr. Pandits' more extreme comments and a debate on the broader questions as well as suggestions on how more interaction between NGOs and government engineers can lead to better management and decisions in the water sector.