Harvey vs. The Monsoon

Special Report

Massive flooding.

High rebuilding costs. 

Livelihoods destroyed.

The devastation across the Caribbean, Florida, and Texas in Hurricanes Harvey and Irma is nothing compared to this year's rains in Asia.

Over a hundred people died in the two storms: roughly 70 in Hurricane Harvey, and over 50 in Hurricane Irma. These figures are alarming, but seem paltry compared to the wreckage across South Asia:

• At least 1,200 people across North India, Bangladesh, and Nepal have been killed by the monsoon so far this year.(1)

• A third of low-lying Bangladesh is reported to be underwater (3).

• The International Red Cross has said that the floods are the worst for forty years - including the rains in 2014 and 2005 (which brought Mumbai to a standstill).

Flooding in India's western Gujarat state

The monsoon is the yearly rain season in South Asia, stretching from July to September. The concentration of rain is 70% of India's yearly rainfall; it's vital to maintain agriculture and farming, in order to supply one billion people with food. Not enough rain means less food, potentially causing an economic crisis (2). Yet too much rain is also a problem. 

While monsoon rains are often violent and destructive – they tend to occur in poorer states where infrastructure to handle the rain isn't available – this one is devastating even by normal standards, and surpasses the ruin from 2014. (6)

1.8 million children are unable to go to school; whole states are flooded; clean water is scarce: people are forced to drink disease-infested, filthy water, which leads to epidemics of cholera and typhoid. Mumbai, a city in West India and the country's financial hub, has seen buildings collapse and electricity cut. (7)

It’s not hard to grasp that this is a major problem.      

Mumbai underwater

What's worse is the lack of attention that such a disaster has caused. This is far from the lavish social media attention following the United States' natural disasters, which have caused fewer fatalities and far more international sympathy.

Houston underwater  

The total GDP of the USA is $18.57 trillion. The total GDP of India/Bangladesh/Nepal is just over $2.5 trillion, so it's the Asian nations which have less capability to handle the crisis, and are working on a yearly deadline to repair and rebuild.

Where’s the 24-hour news coverage and donations from across the world? (8)

(N.B. This isn’t to say that the hurricanes were over-exaggerated or their effect was minimal - nor the people who died in them were unimportant and meaningless. Few would deny that they caused massive disaster.)

Most news organisations only began to show an interest when two toddlers died in the floods (5), reckoning that stories of dead children would ‘sell’, but general destruction and chaos wouldn’t. Leading up to the end of August, Texan floods secured three times as much media attention as the Indian monsoon - this was non-American media alone.  

Within America, Harvey was mentioned one hundred times more than India. (9)  

Why is there such a disparity in the media? Do they think that we care more for the affairs of white, 'civilised' nations more than Asian 'peasant' countries? Is it less effort to report from New York than New Delhi? Or do they simply not care? 

A more famous case of media bias, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, when terrorism in France dwarfed more serious bombings in Beirut, even though casualties were significantly less.

Of course, it's less common for hurricanes to hit the USA - and never in such a short space of time - but already people are rebuilding and rehousing. There's little more to be gained from covering the States.

But the monsoon still hasn't finished.

There needs to be a very good reason for this bias, because right now it's ensuring that hundreds of people are dying and without the slightest flicker of concern from our media - and consequently, us.