TOKYO, Nov. 29, 2023—Though details are sketchy and unverifiable, the reported successful rescue of all 41 workers from the collapse of tunnel construction is more than being reckoned with as miraculous and great.
Just like the country’s landing of a Moon rover, Chandrayaan-3, on the planet’s south pole, India’s technicians registered their tenacity and will power to save the 41 lives – who could well have been abandoned as dispensable low-wage labor had it happened a decade earlier.
It appears, to me, to be a combined yield of cumulative technology improvements the country has built up over decades and prime minister Narendra Modi’s policy campaign to uplift his country’s global image.
It’s an analogy in stark contrast to what would be like if a similar accident happens in Japan: The prime minister’s office would convene an emergency cabinet meeting, instructing heads of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ Fire and Disaster Management Agency, the Ministry of Defense, the National Police Agency, the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare, and possibly other ministries that can offer technical and other assistances to come to rescue work.
In reality, though, that emergency cabinet meeting would caution that rescue staff to be dispatched newly to the disaster scene should be extra careful not be get involved in secondary disaster, so those staff would be at the scene but are not likely to engage in the real rescue work that is likely being done by those that were initially sent to the scene.
Even though there has been no comparable disasters in Japan for years, those trapped in the (hypothetical) accident thus may not gain access to much-needed medicine, water, food, oxygen and other vital needs in time since non-first-arrived rescuers may not be allowed to jump into the scene by risking their lives.
Plus, one can speculate from the photos of the Indian tunnel construction site that Indian engineers might have acquired advanced skills in drilling safely and other necessary arrangements as they did in landing the moon rover.
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