Disastrous management

Life can’t be easy for the country’s district administrators who are ultimately responsible for all relief work.

One day the administrators are told by Met officials that there will be a deficiency of rain, and in no time they find that large parts of the country are reeling under flash floods!

While the Met department’s 3-4 day forecasts seem to be more on target than their 3-4 month assays, it remains true that, time and again, district administrations from Delhi to Dadri take between 24 and 72 hours to get their act together—whether it is a riot, flood or famine.

In the well-publicised case of the 600 passengers who were stranded for two nights on a train at Dakor near Ahmedabad because of floods, even the air force couldn’t airlift the passengers (or even air drop enough supplies).

But, strangely, one man with grit was able to take a motorcade (a car, two multi-utility vehicles and a truck with bread, butter and other eatables) to the train, wade through the water and rescue the entire trainload of passengers! What did that say of the whole administration and the relief machinery?

While the circumstances of each disaster incident are obviously different, and manuals must exist for handling each kind of emergency, it does seem to be the case that the local administration is usually caught unprepared and flat-footed—either the manuals are not distributed to the people concerned, or no one reads them, or having read them does not take the required downstream action.

In the case of the Uphaar cinema fire in Delhi in 1997, it was found that the nation’s capital did not have enough trauma facilities to handle fewer than 100 people who finally perished in the fire.

In the Orissa cyclone some years ago, the first reports indicated that West Bengal would bear the brunt of the cyclone, yet hardly any attempts were made to evacuate people till the Prime Minister’s Office got in touch with the chief minister.

In Orissa, despite the advance warning, only one lakh people were evacuated prior to the cyclone, when it could have been a million.

Ironically, though Orissa is a cyclone-prone state, the state had few cyclone shelters.

While the Gujarat government managed to do some good rehabilitation work after the Bhuj earthquake (that’s when Narendra Modi was first sent to the state!), the fact of the matter is that the country’s hazard map shows Gujarat is in the highest seismic zone.

Yet, the state was caught napping, and there was enough corruption to allow corrupt builders to construct buildings without proper safety features.

Ironically, the equally earthquake-prone Nepal had been using low-cost earthquake-proofing solutions (essentially retro-fitting of buildings by strengthening the side columns or inserting L-shaped “stitches” in wall corners) offered by a professor of Roorkee University for a long time, but it was only after Bhuj that the country heard of his designs in India.

While India needs to map river basin flows and develop flood forecasting models of the type countries like Bangladesh claim to have already worked out, another solution lies (as seen in Turkey) in getting insurance companies involved in the exercise, as this creates external stakeholders.

In Turkey, the insurance agencies which insured houses were responsible for approving building codes and construction practices since eventually they had to make the pay-outs for damage to buildings.