The torrents of the monsoon bring not just water, but a chilling clarity. As rains trigger deadly floods and landslides across the Himalayan foothills, the agonizing question, "Where is God in the flood?" becomes a raw, secular demand: "Where are the engineers, the hydrologists, and the disaster experts?"
This is the profound moral and developmental reckoning facing nations like Nepal, where a history of suppressed scientific education has created a dangerous dependency on faith, tradition, and external aid to cope with crises that should, in part, be preventable.
The Ghost of Suppression: Trading Science for Superstition
The emotional critique that time and energy have been wasted on ritual while neglecting practical, secular problem-solving is validated by history. While the West was establishing great centers of critical thought like Oxford (1096), Cambridge (1209), and MIT, Nepal's centuries-long feudal regimes actively banned mass education until the 1950s. For generations, modern scientific and engineering knowledge was an exclusive privilege, creating a massive expertise deficit. This suppression of mass education and critical thinking is the root cause of today’s vulnerability. Without a large-scale, well-trained local workforce of civil engineers, urban planners, and seismologists, communities settle in floodplains, homes are built without adherence to building codes, and early warning systems lack the necessary local technical support. Energy spent on making a religious idol does not stop a river from eroding its banks; a trained engineer building a check dam does.
The Double-Edged Role of Faith in Crisis
When a disaster strikes, the immediate response on the ground often highlights the complex role of religious belief. For many victims, religious concepts like karma or divine will offer a necessary, immediate psychological framework for processing catastrophic loss. Faith provides emotional and social cohesion when all else is lost. The critical danger is when faith becomes a substitute for functional, scientific preparedness. When a community relies solely on prayer for protection instead of demanding the construction of a scientifically sound embankment or investing in a modern warning system, it ensures its own continued vulnerability.
The Inevitable Path to Resilience: Prioritizing STEAM
For Nepal and other highly-vulnerable nations, moving from "calling on God" to "calling on science" is not a rejection of culture, but an act of national survival. Disaster response, infrastructure planning, and resource allocation must be driven by scientific data and secular policy, overriding traditional or political pressures. This means rigorously enforcing building codes, implementing zoning laws, and utilizing geospatial technology for risk mapping.
International and national efforts now emphasize "Citizen Disaster Science Education (CDSE)." This involves teaching children and communities the basic science of their local hazards—hydrology, landslides, and fault lines—to enable them to make informed, life-saving decisions without solely relying on external authorities. The overwhelming majority of loss of life is preventable through structural and non-structural measures designed by experts: flood-resistant infrastructure, early-warning systems (which have proven highly effective in saving lives in Nepal), and slope stabilization using bio-engineering.
The future resilience of a nation depends on its capacity for secular, critical problem-solving. The challenge is to stop seeing the problem as merely a tragic flood that warrants prayer, and to start seeing it as an engineering and educational failure that demands a profound national commitment to Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM). Only then can the lives lost in the next monsoon be saved by the experts who were finally allowed to be born and educated at home.