COLUMN

Not by high-tech alone

An obsession with high technology gadgets and failure to ensure popular involvement in disaster management prevented the officialdom from really helping the cyclone victims.

PRAFUL BIDWAI

AS more details come in of the terrible human tragedy and extensive devastation wreaked by the "super cyclone" on coastal Orissa, it becomes apparent that what we have on our hands is not just a natural calamity, but a social catastrophe compounded by administrative failure and political ineptitude, coupled with callousness. The catastrophe has reduced human existence to hellish conditions, sending man and beast alike foraging for food, and often to the same funeral pyre. Thousands of people perished not just because nature vented its fury in an exceptionally savage way, but because society failed to heed the warnings, and then to prepare itself through preventive, remedial and ameliorative action. There are many lessons for public policy in the cyclone and its aftermath. But just consider this:

* Meteorologists had warned four days earlier of the build-up of cyclonic circulation east of the Andamans, which was gathering monstrous energy. But the authorities just sat and watched rather than prepare and implement preventive and evacuation plans. Meanwhile, with each day, the cyclone system picked up lethal momentum before hitting the coast.

* All India Radio and Doordarshan did broadcast cyclone warnings, but these were delivered in such technology-overdosed, obscure, and Sanskrit-laden language that they were not understood by the most vulnerable people and those at greatest risk: fisherfolk and port workers, and those living in shantytowns and flimsy houses.

* The first casualty of the cyclone was the official disaster management and relief system itself. The telephone lines of all the high officials went dead. Orissa's capital was cut off. Even 48 hours later, only two telephone lines were working - in the Chief Minister's house, and hence of little use to the outside world.

* The authorities' first response was to procure and rely on high-technology gadgets, such as satellite phones, helicopters and remote-sensing imagery. Most of these entirely failed - for instance, due to "inclement" weather (what else did they expect?) - or caused long delays, without yielding good results. What worked was good-old Hams or amateur radio communicators, robust Second World War vintage walkie-talkies and old-style high-clearance trucks and heavy vehicles.

* The Army's eastern infantry units were in a state of readiness since October 25 to provide alternative communication (especially road) links and relief. But they got their movement orders only after disaster struck on October 29. Their mobility was cramped.

* One of the biggest failures was that of the very agency that is meant to manage catastrophes and coordinate relief operations, namely, the National Disaster Management Division, a full-fledged cell of the Ministry of Agriculture. It first proved totally clueless, then panicked, and later became totally incommunicado. Its control room complained: all lines are down, there are no satellite pictures owing to heavy cloud cover, there is no power, we are helpless... This compounds an already tainted record. A recent report from the Comptroller and Auditor-General documents that as much as Rs.670 crores of the Calamity Relief Fund was misused during 1995-98.

AS the officialdom bungled, and Ministers and politicians whirred around (seemingly importantly but really without any purpose) in helicopters, people drowned and choked to death, cattle were swept away by 260-kmph winds, boats capsized, the port of Paradeep - one of India's five busiest ports, which handles 25 million tonnes a year - went under, over 15 million people became homeless and many more had to go without drinking water, even food. Chaos and mayhem raged in the ghost towns of Orissa. Order collapsed amidst widespread looting of food by the starving people. The official relief operation was shamefully meagre in scale, painfully slow in starting, callous and inconsiderate in its planning, and badly targeted, and blind to the needs of the poor. Four days into the disaster, nothing betrayed official ineptitude more than the fact that the first relief train was dispatched not from Orissa, or any of the States bordering it, but from Delhi!

IT would not do to plead that the catastrophe in Orissa was unavoidable because it was caused by a natural calamity beyond control, or that the eastern coast is especially vulnerable to cyclones about which nothing can be done. This argument misses two points. India, or South Asia, is not uniquely susceptible to natural calamities. Nor are "natural" disasters socially neutral in their effects. They pick on the poor and the weak. To take the first point, the United States and Europe are also prone to disasters such as earthquakes. And yet, according to the environmental research group Earthscan, earthquakes killing more than 10,000 people have only occurred in the Third World. Similar hurricanes regularly hit the east coast of the U.S., but their toll is infinitesimally smaller than in India, Bangladesh or the Philippines.

For instance, the average Japanese disaster kills 63 people. But in Peru the average toll is 2,900. At the same time as the Latur earthquake in Maharashtra, California experienced a quake of magnitude 7.4 (Richter scale), which was 100 times more powerful than the Indian event. While entire families were wiped out in Maharashtra, only one person died in California. When Hurricane Elena hit the U.S. in 1985, only five people died. But when a cyclone slammed Bangladesh in 1991, half a million people were killed.

The U.S. is as susceptible to severe cyclones as India's eastern coast. Each year, 10 major tropical storms (of which six become hurricanes) develop over the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. An average of five strike the U.S. coastline every three years. Of these five, two hurricanes are major ones. But government agencies, rescue and relief organisations, and the news media launch a huge warning and preparedness effort. The airwaves are flooded with detailed advice on how to face impending emergencies. Information is frequently updated and people are asked to stock provisions and medicines, and given emergency service numbers. In the global South, information about emergency plans is withheld from the public.

SUSHANTA PATRONOBISH
Victims of the cyclone trudging their way to safety.

The vast majority who die in "natural" disasters are the Third World's poor. They perish not because of the intrinsically deadlier nature of the calamity itself, but because they are socially and physically vulnerable - being forced to live in congested, overcrowded and unsafe conditions in dangerous areas. Their suffering is avoidably greater because the medical and relief infrastructure is hopelessly inadequate and usually the first to crumble under the impact of a calamity. Above all, the authorities' planning of emergency relief provision - especially of absolute necessities such as shelter, food and water - is appallingly bad. It is this, rather than the absolute, intrinsic, severity of a cyclone or earthquake or a tidal wave that explains why human life is wantonly lost, why the poor suffer the most. The scale of damage, whether social, physical or environmental, is socially determined.

IN the case of India, the magnitude of such devastation has increased roughly three- to eight-fold over the past three decades. This increase has little to do with growing population or congestion. Rather, it is explained by other social phenomena, especially three factors: the tampering with and erosion of natural or physical protective "barriers"; the growing search for, and obsession with, high-technology quick-fixes to social problems; and the increasing inefficiency of relief provision amidst social callousness and apathy.

First, excessive human activity right along the coastline has led to the destruction of mangroves and hardy natural vegetation, including shrubs, that could slow down hurricane-speed winds and bind the soil. This is especially true where predatory activity is promoted, often in breach of the Coastal Zone Regulations - for example, commercial-scale prawn cultivation. At another level, there is the growing phenomenon of dam-induced seismicity, which too makes us more earthquake-prone.

Second, rather than rely on simple, easy-to-use, commonsense-oriented and accessible methods and devices, our administrators have developed a peculiar fascination for sophisticated, electronics-dependent, complicated systems that need expertise and special attention.

Thus, the India Meteorological Department got everything right with sophisticated weather satellites and computer weather modelling. But its much-neglected land communication lines simply did not work. These are vital to its ability to transmit data to the regional units where the action is. Our scientocrats have evidently paid little attention to the simple, the terrestrial, the down-to-earth, the familiar, the easy - as distinct from the sophisticated, the ethereal, the celestial, the exotic. After the Kandla cyclone last year, the government commissioned a report for disaster preparedness, which emphasised satellite phones, high-resolution satellite imagery, expensive big cranes. (Many of our highways and culverts are not wide or strong enough to transport heavy equipment.) These would be welcome if they can be relied upon. That rarely happens. In any case, they cannot be a substitute for something far simpler.

An example is cyclone shelters: rugged, simple, two- or three-storeyed structures that can withstand 300 kmph winds and tidal waves, where people can take refuge, and where emergency food and water rations can be stored. These inexpensive shelters have saved tens of thousands of lives in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh since the 1980s, and many more even in Bangladesh in the last few years. Orissa has hardly any of these. Nor has the government invested in simple, cheap AM or FM radio sets - to be provided at a nominal cost to fisherfolk. Providing each sub-divisional tehsil/taluk town with decent fire-engines and rugged all-weather high-clearance vehicles will probably be far more cost-effective, and in absolute terms much cheaper, than buying a $5-million helicopter.

People are the most crucial input in relief provision and in disaster planning and management. If the local population is allowed and encouraged to participate in such programmes, their success rate would rise dramatically. Indeed, their inputs in planning and in actual implementation are ultimately vital. But that is where the third factor comes in: the officialdom would much rather bypass the people in whose name and for whose benefit it is supposed to work. Having inherited and fully internalised hierarchical and casteist attitudes, it is fundamentally hostile to popular involvement, participation and ownership of disaster management programmes.

Nor are our political leaders and bureaucrats, especially the latter, answerable to the public in a transparent way which really pins responsibility on them and punishes them for non-performance, while rewarding helpful conduct. This, coupled with our generally poor culture of safety, which too absolves the guilty of responsibility, makes for high levels of inefficiency and poor performance.

If there is one undeniable fact about our officialdom, it is that it has got corrupted to a point where its sense of obligation and duty to the public stands seriously compromised. Such people cannot be asked or expected to be sensitive, genuinely empathetic and compassionate to ordinary, poor, citizens, especially those in acute distress. It would be far-fetched to imagine their being sensitive to such things as the need for psychological counselling and kind behaviour - something that is now part of what is considered normal relief provision even in a relatively callous Western society like the U.S.

The forms of behaviour involved here too are socially determined. They directly affect the extent of damage and distress that people suffer. It is futile to indulge in breast-beating about whether the Orissa cyclone was grade seven or eight in intensity. Rather, we must treat it as a national emergency at least on a par with, if not greater than, the Kargil War, and mobilise an all-out effort to help the cyclone-affected. The primary focus must be on public action, on getting the government to deliver relief, to learn, to reform its conduct, to involve people, and to perform a socially useful function which is basically irreplaceable. If we succeed even to a small extent in this, the suffering of the people of Orissa will not have been in vain.