As the monsoon season nears, cities across India prepare for the same story to play out once again. Flooded streets, stalled traffic, stranded commuters and inundated homes are no longer rare disasters; they are routine.
Frequent headlines of trade wars and real wars, economic disruptions and humanitarian disasters indicate a world that is in the midst of multiple crises.
A famous Horace quote reads: “Nothing is an unmixed blessing”. This underlines the dual nature of human innovations ~ how they can solve our problems but also create new ones which lead to disasters. Yogi Berra aptly said: “The future isn’t what it used to be.”
Himachal Pradesh (HP) recorded the second-highest number of deaths in hydro-meteorological disasters in the country this year, with 358 fatalities reported due to rains, landslides, and cloudburst incidents.
Since the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), a non-governmental organisation based in Geneva, started collating data on persons displaced by disasters in 2018, this set of the population has been increasing.
The Baoji-Chengdu Railway, a key railway line in western China, resumed traffic after 25 days of disruption due to flood-triggered geological disasters.
Floods and geological disasters triggered by recent heavy rainfall in east China's Jiangxi Province had impacted over 1.56 million people by Thursday evening, according to statistics revealed by local authorities.
The training camp, divided into three phases, will cater to 25 ADMs each from diverse districts.
North Korea called on party officials to make all-out efforts to protect the people's lives and provide safety from a "frenzy of nature", thereby implementing the country's five-year economic policy plan that was adopted in 2021, Yonhap News Agency quoted Rodong Sinmun, the North's main newspaper, as saying in a report.
The disasters that have laid low two of India’s hill states ~ Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand ~ are attributable as much to the vagaries of nature as they are to the depredations wrought by man.
