Tunnel vision in the information age
India/Bharat is a very rare country in news monoculture, but to say that for two weeks an event has been unseen is not an exaggeration. No less surprising in its exceptionality, which is the humanitarian profile of the incident.
On Sunday, November 12, at dawn, between Silkyara Band and Barcot 134 of the American state of Uttarakhand. Part of the 4.5 kilometres of tunnel being built to shorten and facilitate the 65-metre National Road fell to about 200 metres from the only access that the works currently have. The stone jump didn't flood anyone, but it left 41 workers trapped inside. The work to rescue them, which initially seemed not to be so complicated, has been hooked up and, despite life and basic resources (air, electricity, water and food), has had to spend sixteen days trapped.
As rescues get hooked and lengthened, along with the anxiety of the relatives of trapped people, the anger of public opinion has become aggressive, at least in part. Perhaps not so much because of the slow rescue (they work in adverse conditions: The tunnel is 1,700 metres high, the relief must come from a diabolical road, the tunnel excavator has been broken…), but because of the undue conditions that the works and the workers had.
But the criticism is not exhausted, because there is also talk of the circumstances and timing of the project itself. The tunnel is being built in a vulnerable environment, and the object of the work is to buy access to the various Indian shrines that are more integrated into the Himalayas, according to the political agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When the elections are six months away, the fact is not in vain. And it's getting a lot of attention in local media.
For those of us who are further away, of course, the news wouldn't have that much attraction. But memory reminds us of the case of young people trapped in the Tham Luang cave in Thailand for seventeen days in 2018, world news. And above all by affinity, in 2010, which buried 33 miners from the Chilean farm San José de Copiapó for more than two months, whose rescue became a global spectacle.
In this case, India is not at all. The news has hardly been known to us. Because local government also prefers it? Why is it in India? Why do we have previous ones?
In the information there is also tunnel view.
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