Heavy snowfall since Friday night in Shimla and around has thrown life out of gear in the state capital, exposing gaps in preparedness of authorities to manage things in the wake of much expected snow.
It is just the season’s second snowfall in Shimla (which saw a light spell of snow on Christmas) that has made the locals shiver without power over last two days in the biting cold, with water supply scrapped, to compound their woes further.
The administration was not able to restore electricity in majority areas, including hospitals in Shimla, till the filing of this report on Sunday evening, making it worse for tourists too, who had no option but to crib and pack off their bags in disappointment.
Many were frantically calling up tourism authorities to rescue them from hotels and rest houses ahead of Shimla as snow filled roads made it difficult for them to drive back. “We are ready to pay even for the snow cutter. We didn’t know that we will get stranded with children in snow like this,” said GM Bansal, a tourist from Haryana, who had gone to Shimla for a leisure trip, but only had to curse the government for promoting Himachal as ‘all weather tourism state’.
The patients suffered the most as the emergency ambulances too could not ply with over two feet snow on roads in the city, which was not cleared even by Sunday evening in majority areas, barring few lanes where the VIPs live.
The local buses and bus routes to upper Shimla remained suspended since Friday night.
Deputy Commissioner, Shimla,Rohan Chand Thakur, when contacted, told The Statesman, “We are continuously on the job. The power supply could have been restored yesterday itself, but for more snowfall. Many trees (the number still not known) got uprooted in two days snowfall that damaged the electricity lines. Our first priority is to restore power in hospitals.”
Thakur said Shimla saw heavy snowfall after a long period so the problems were more.
The locals, however, are upset. “The policy makers lack vision to handle snowfall in Shimla. The city faces similar problems every year whenever it snows,” said some irate residents. “They spend lakhs of Rupees on disaster preparedness or disaster management trainings. But where is their plan to tackle snowfall, which is a normal phenomenon. Shimla is not a remote or tribal pocket that snow should snap all the basic amenities here,” they hastened to add.
If one goes into the mess-up reported in snowfall in Shimla all times in the past, snow always brings along century old basic problems in the Queen of Hills, which has, ironically, been vying hard for the smart city status to get itself updated to modern times.
The successive state governments have simply failed to work out alternative systems in the state capital to keep the basic amenities like power, water supply and road connectivity alive in snow.