Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Every year, around the third week of July, a photograph arrives on our family WhatsApp group from my aunt in Hyderabad. It shows the lane outside her flat with water up to the door handles of the parked cars. The caption changes. The water does not.
The usual explanation is the rain, and the rain is easy to blame. It does fall in fewer and fiercer bursts now, and no drain built for an older climate can carry a month’s share in one afternoon. But this account leaves something out. The Deccan never had water to spare, and the kings and village councils who settled it learnt to hold on to what fell. They dug chains of tanks, each one spilling into the next one downhill, so that a heavy storm was handed on from tank to tank instead of being poured into a street. Hyderabad once had hundreds of them. Bengaluru’s old lakes worked the same way.
Many of those tanks, in both cities, now lie under bus stands, housing colonies and, in one case I know of, a stadium. Nobody plotted this. A dry lakebed in May looks like empty land, and a myopic kind of planning, the kind that reads a map only for the next five years, saw no reason to leave it empty. The tanks were not destroyed so much as forgotten, one plot at a time.
I do not think the answer is to dig them all out again; too many families live where the water used to sit. But I have noticed that the lanes which flood first often have names ending in ‘kunta’ or ‘cheruvu’, the Telugu words for a pond and a lake. The city has kept the names. It has only lost the reason for them.
The word ‘myopic’, as used in the passage, means:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → thinking only of the near future, not the long term
Myopic means short-sighted. A myopic plan looks only at the near future and does not think about what will happen later.
- The passage itself explains the word. It is planning that “reads a map only for the next five years”.
- In May, a dry lakebed looks like empty land. Such planning did not think of the July rains in years to come. So it saw no reason to leave the land empty. Example: Cutting the school library budget to repaint the gate was a myopic decision.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: eager to make a quick profit from land — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: this is closer to the meaning of mercenary, which means caring only about money. The passage never speaks of profit. Example: The mercenary shopkeeper doubled the price of umbrellas on the first day of rain.
Option 2: unwilling to spend money on public works — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: this is the meaning of parsimonious (very unwilling to spend money). The planning in the passage built a great deal. Its fault was not looking ahead. Example: The parsimonious committee would not pay for new fans in the classrooms.
Option 3: hasty and careless about small details — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: this is the meaning of slapdash. The writer’s point is about time, not care. The plans looked only five years ahead. Example: His slapdash homework was full of spelling mistakes.