Air India crash: 'Don't jump to any conclusion', says aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu on AAIB's preliminary report
NEW DELHI: Union aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu urged people Saturday not to "jump to any conclusion" regarding the AI-171 crash and "wait for the final (probe) report", his comments coming hours after Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) made public a preliminary report on the investigation of the June 12 Ahmedabad tragedy.
"...Let us wait for the final report. These are technical things and that is why we have these investigation agencies. Once they are clear... they are going to submit the final report. At this stage it will be very immature for me to comment on it," the minister said.
This is the first time that the black boxes of a crashed aircraft are being decoded in India - at AAIB lab in Delhi. "I would like to appreciate all the efforts they put in to do a very transparent, very mature (and) professional way the investigation has been done (sic).
AAIB has followed all international protocols while preparing the report."
Promising assistance to AAIB in submitting the final report, Naidu said: "We have to wait for something concrete to emerge. This is a preliminary report right now and from the ministry we are analysing the report, but I think it would be better if we comment on it once the final report is out. We are hoping that the final report comes in as soon as possible, then we can arrive at some conclusion."
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There are "multiple other things" that also need to be looked into before preparing the final report, he said.
Naidu praised AAIB, Indian pilots, and cabin crews, calling them "best" in the world. "Justice has to be done. I know it is a very difficult time for the family members, but from our side, whatever best we can do from the ministry, we are trying to assist," he added.
Union junior minister for civil aviation Murlidhar Mohol said: "This is a preliminary report and not final one. It is still under purview of investigation so it would not be right to comment. I request everyone to not arrive at any conclusion till the final report is out."
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A once heterogeneous collection of people and places had, in effect, been radically transformed through imperial science, hydraulic technologies, cement and quantitative hydrology into a smoothened landscape dominated by landed property and settled commercial agriculture. Put simply, before the Indus River system was turned into national entities, the flows had been organised as a 'colonial resource regime' , which in the main involved damming and controlling the rivers through a vast artificial network of canals. Unsurprisingly, when the Radcliffe Line announced a hard border between India and Pakistan in August of 1947, the complex web of interconnected flows was unravelled and disarticulated. In the newly created political boundaries, it became the case that several diversion structures, regulators and dams fell on different sides of the border from the canals they had previously diverted waters into. 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In the words of the brilliant Pakistani geographer Majed Akhter, the newly minted countries particularly ignored the ' hydrological bonds ' or 'hydrologic interconnectivity' between the various tributaries and within the basin region. Governments, in other words, even as they fought over the quantity of waters remained blind to viewing the rivers as qualitative ecological processes. River ecology emerges From the 1980s, the belief that rivers are merely moving masses of water has, in fact, been conceptually challenged. In the changed framework, rivers are more carefully studied as geomorphologic, chemical and biological processes that are made up of a rich mosaic of habitats which make aquatic life possible. It is now widely understood that variable flows create and maintain a range of ecological relationships between the channel, floodplain, wetland and the estuary. Wetlands, moreover, are important nursery grounds for fish and provide habitats for various kinds of flora and fauna. The Indus basin in such a reckoning can be thus more meaningfully grasped as a weave of ecological webs that entangle Pakistan and India within a single inter-connected environmental bloc rather than as nations divided by rivers. This shift in perspective which treats rivers as a 'natural endowment' brimming with ecological services instead of a 'natural resource' to be dammed and diverted becomes particularly significant in the contemporary context of global warming. As a natural endowment, the Indus River system moreover is no longer limited to being a captive of the expertise of the engineer. Instead, it can now be assessed more broadly through a whole slew of different knowledges. That is, the river can be assembled as a multi-dimensional entity through conversations between biologists, ecologists, local histories, fishing groups, ichthyologists, farmers, irrigators and so on. In other words, the quantitative engineering vision gets decentered with an emphasis, in turn, on understanding the varied ecological and social qualities that makes up flows. Such a perspectival shift to an ecological river, moreover, acquires considerable significance in the contemporary context of global warming. Increasingly, there are growing alarms about climate uncertainties: receding glaciers and the palpable increase in extreme weather events such as heat waves, extraordinary flooding or intense droughts. In 2010, for example, Pakistan witnessed an unprecedented climate shock. Following the unusual halting of an entire jet stream over the western Himalayas sometime in July of that year an intense precipitation episode followed. Such was the intensity that four months of rainfall fell, by one estimate, in the span of a few days. The devastation brought on by the 'great floods' of 2010 proved to be mind boggling. In one survey, 21 million people were declared as having been impacted. Close to 1,700 people or more perished and 1.8 million homes were damaged or destroyed. In its wake, the floods also rummaged through 2.3 million hectares of standing crops and brought about a loss of $5 billion to the agriculture sector alone and another $4 billion to physical and social infrastructure. In sum, climate change impacts in the very near future will not be trifling and are expected to engulf the entire basin region. Climate change and infrastructures for peace The need and urgency to mitigate climate change impacts will demand basin level strategies such as technical coordination, social cooperation and the building of high levels of trust to develop and sustain resilience capacities. Close to 300 million people currently inhabit the Indus Basin region, which stretches across the countries of Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and India. Of these, the major share of 47% and 39% of the populace are in Pakistan and India, respectively. To talk of weaponising the Indus Waters Treaty, therefore, is not only being entirely unmindful and irresponsible in the face of the broader basin wide threats that climate change impacts will bring, but it will also undermine the urgent efforts to speedily help South Asia overcome its flawed and troubled colonial resource and river control legacies. Recovering the idea of the ecological river and developing the notion of flows as natural endowments will, in fact, be crucial to how hopeful futures for a climate impacted region can be envisioned. On the other hand, will creating a large-scale humanitarian crisis in Pakistan by abrogating the Indus Waters Treaty or haphazardly scrambling flows stop terrorism? If the horrors inflicted on the people of Gaza by an arrogant Israeli government is any indication, the world at large rapidly loses sympathy for any state action that targets innocent women and children for crimes created by armed men. Instead, both countries have it within their means to turn the Indus Waters Treaty into an 'infrastructure for peace'. That is, by reimagining the intricate river network as sources for resilience and cooperation across the Indus basin, constituencies for peace can be created. Is this sounding too idealistic and impractical? There is no magic bullet against terrorism and the only real meaningful strategy is to make violence politically unsustainable. If war is not a real option, then only peace is possible.
