Preempting the floods
Many households across the nation have to battle the two extremes of droughts and floods. But a recent move to tackle this by handing the prime minister direct control over the core water management agency may be missing the bigger issue.
The catastrophic floods that recently swept through the upper sections of the Northeast left an unprecedented trail of destruction in Sakon Nakhon, Nakhon Phanom and other provinces. Reservoirs were breached and communities were left at the mercy of rapidly rising water levels.
The authorities raced against the clock to hand out relief to flood victims and evacuate residents, many of whom watched their homes and farmland swallowed up by floodwaters they were ill-prepared to deal with.
Refusing to be on the receiving end of public criticism, the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation insisted it had issued repeated warnings of the impending floods in the Northeast, a statement disputed by some downtown residents and business owners in Sakon Nakhon, who said they were left in dire straits after losing most of their inventories to inundation.
Observers say the country pays a hefty price every year for both remedial and compensatory post-flood measures, when it should be doing more to mitigate future damage from such disasters by macro-managing the water.
But one of the impediments to such efforts has been a lack of an integrated, inter-agency approach to implementing water management policy. More significantly, there is a conspicuous absence of someone high enough in the chain of command to lead those efforts, according to observers who said that Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has apparently been made wise to this reality.
On Aug 9, the premier reportedly invoked the powerful Section 44 of the interim charter to move the Water Resource Department (WRD), currently under the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry, to the PM’s Office, said department chief Warasart Apaipong. This effectively places the department under the auspices of the prime minister.
But the other vital water management “organ” has not followed suit. Rather, the Royal Irrigation Department will remain under the Agriculture and Co-operatives Ministry to serve as an operations agency, said Agriculture Minister Chatchai Sarikulya.
Critics said the two departments should work in concert, ideally under the same ministry. Critics have said it may be pointless having an agency tasked with looking after water sources report to one ministry, while the agency responsible for distributing water answers to another.
But a source familiar with the issue said it was inadequate to limit the water management debate to a question of which agencies should report to which ministries. The source said the government should “think and act big” by establishing a water ministry to integrate the water-related charges by bringing the relevant agencies under one roof.
That move would also streamline policy advocacy and practice, minus the need to secure inter-departmental approval to get water projects off the ground and moving.
The source said that the magnitude of disasters brought on by flooding and droughts every year, which require large chunks of the state budget to fix, validates the argument in favour of opening a new ministry dedicated to water management.