A seemingly universal media phenomenon is the farther away from home a story hits, the bigger it has to be to receive coverage. Thus, the recent monsoon floods in Mumbai, India - formerly Bombay - will likely receive a few brief minutes of attention in the U.S., whereas things such as the Mississippi Floods of 1993 were practically the story of the year, even though the death toll was much lower.
Recent monsoon rains in western India have caused devastating floods in the Maharashtra state, which includes Mumbai. Officials estimated the number of deaths might reach 1000, many of them due to collapsed housing and mudslides.
In Mumbai, demonstrators blocked traffic for hours on Saturday demanding fresh drinking water, electricity and the clearing of animal carcasses.
If a similar incident happened in the United States, the president would have to fly out to the area in the Marine One helicopter within hours or else face a media debacle. Yet these monsoons in India might not create big waves here.
The floods in India and other similar foreign natural disasters, deserve some attention because they highlight certain comparisons between life in the industrialized world and developing world. Many of the things U.S. citizens take for granted don't come easily elsewhere.
For example, drinking water is so commonplace in the U.S. that bottled water can be successfully marketed as being more refreshing than tap water. The cleanliness and amount of pathogens in the water isn't even the issue for Americans - taste is.
In contrast, 2.6 billion people, or 40 percent of the world's population, lack basic sanitation and one billion lack reliable access to safe drinking water, according to The New York Times ("Bad to the last drop," NYT 8/1). Right now, the residents of the Maharashtra state can be added to that list.
The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of illness in the world is from waterborne diseases. Indeed, the flooding in India has increased the likelihood of getting such diseases.
Unlike many other societies, American society has many resources at its disposal to helping the developing world with rudimentary problems such as disaster relief, clean water and other necessities of life.
Americans should flex a little bit of this industrial muscle and extend a hand to countries hit by natural disasters. Many did so in the wake of the tsunami disaster in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand last December. They should do so again.
