There is a lot of information on Twitter about the way government agencies are handling the monsoon season in Bengaluru. However, an effort to collate and provide a centralised handle for information collection and dissemination by the government seems to have fallen by the wayside.
In May this year, the government announced the launch of the Monsoon Monitoring Cell (MMC) which would operate a Twitter handle, @mmcblr, supposed to be the ‘exclusive handle’ where people could tweet their concerns.
However, while the handle saw some posts early on, there has not been a single post in the past 38 days at a time when parts of the city has seen flooding.
Part of the problem seems to be a lack of ownership for the account. When a few agencies were asked if they operate the account, all of them said no.
“It was set up for a group of engineers from different departments who established the monitoring cell, but it has not been very active,” a senior official with the Fire and Emergency Services said.
With over seven main accounts and several more local and personal accounts, getting centralised information, which was the goal of the @mmcblr handle, seems impossible at the movement.
The Monsoon Monitoring Cell’s Twitter handle has not made a post in the past 38 days
