Brushing, tea, and newspaper, which informs you today, in bold letters, that three more people have lost their lives to the cold wave sweeping through the Tarai plains. A flicker of memory: Didn’t as many die of the same cause yesterday as well? Suddenly, you realize how lucky you are. All your comforts—downy quilts, water heaters, enough clothes to cover yourself—you now come to see, are privileges, that hundreds of thousands of Nepalis still do without.
On Saturday, three people succumbed to extreme cold: two adults from Rautahat district and two-year-old Anjan Maden from Taplejung. The cold wave that has engulfed the Tarai plains for the past one week, especially the region south of Chure range, is unprecedented. Normal life in Rautahat, Bara, Parsa and other mid-Tarai districts has been severely hit: Schools in Rautahat have shut down, Sirma Airport has been rendered dysfunctional for the last few days and the Narayani Sub-regional Hospital has been overflowing with patients with pneumonia and other cold-induced health problems.
Meteorologists believe that the cold breeze is unlikely to let up until the end of the winter season. Unfortunately, there is going to be no respite for these poor and hapless people anytime soon, their desperate situation further compounded by the increased hours of load-shedding starting today. The government, in this situation, is their first (and often their only) line of hope. The onus is thus on the government to take stock of the situation and, working in close concert with NGOs and INGOs, immediately dispatch relief materials like tents and clothes to the worst-affected areas. As important would be timely mobilization of doctors and social workers to look after the smooth flow of vital material and medicine.
Even though weather patterns are devilishly hard to predict, ideally, the country should have been better prepared for extreme conditions this time of the year. Most damaging has been the thick smog cover—a mixture of smoke and fog that results from increased industrial and agricultural pollution in the plains of Nepal, Bangladesh and North India.
Like global climate change, prediction and management of the consequences of extreme weather patterns in the planes will call for collective inter-country initiatives. Meanwhile, maybe it’s about time you stopped complaining about the crummy morning tea and absence of heaters in your office.
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