Reacting to the Weather Department's claim, Chief Secretary Subhash Kumar has categorically said that the department keeps issuing alerts for heavy to very heavy rain in general but it did not issue alert to stop the Char Dham Yatra or rain of such intensity.
With this statement, the State Government has tried to pass its accountability on to the Weather Department, which was busy saying that if State had taken cognisance of its alert then thousands of lives could have been saved. Talking to The Pioneer, Meteorological Centre Director Anand Sharma said, "We had intimated Disaster Management & Mitigation Centre (DMMC) on time. Even The Pioneer had published the story on June 20 that if the State Government machinery had taken cognisance of weather department's alert then casualty figure would have lesser than now. It is clear that we had alerted the DMMC on time".
He also said that he does not want to make any further comment on it because now we can't save anyone by getting into unnecessary debate or doing operation of the previous thing. Instead of doing so we should take lesson from past mistake and incorporate it while making plan in future. Talking to the mediapersons, Chief Secretary Kumar said that it is normal phenomena that weather department sends their alert to the Government. In general they claim that there is possibility of heavy to very heavy rainfall but they did not anticipate that such type of cloudburst would happen in Kedar valley.
Health Minister Surendra Singh Negi also joined the chorus and said that in hills cloudburst is natural phenomena and no one -- including weather department -- had predicted that cloudburst would happen in Kedarnath area. Due to this we have face such a serious casualty.