Losing a child is every parent’s nightmare. From the time the toddler visits the local zoo as part of her school picnic and you pray that the skinny tiger there doesn’t lop off her arm, to when she goes abroad for higher studies and you hope a racist xenophobe from a dysfunctional family doesn’t gun her down in a university rampage, the fear remains constant.

The sight of parents and relatives mourning the loss of their teenaged children in the Beas river tragedy rips your heart apart. And makes you seethe with anger. Is human life of such little value in this country?

The dam officials who released the waters without following protocol were nothing short of callous.

They claim that during ‘emergencies’, not following the protocol is allowed. Pray, what was the emergency that justified the killing of 24 innocent lives? The locals insist the warning sirens were sounded only after the students had already been swept away — an eyewash measure taken by the dam employees.

You would think some basic safety measures would be par for the course in a place where the possibility of an accident is as high as on the banks of a dammed river. There ought to be well-displayed visual marks signifying the water is rising to dangerous levels. The blowing of the siren ought to be automated — the hooters should be triggered by a mechanism preceding the releasing of the waters.

That such systems were not in place and, over and above that, the dam officials chose to be negligent, is a reflection of the total apathy India has for human lives.

We lose thousands and even lakhs of people every now and then to poorly managed natural disasters — the Uttarakhand floods of 2013 are a standing example — and that is sad enough. That we also lose human lives periodically to entirely avoidable human errors is unforgivable.

Senior Assistant Editor

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