COVER STORY

Relief and camps

R. KRISHNAKUMAR
in Colachal, Kayamkulam and Oachira

C. RATHEESH KUMAR

Waiting for food at a camp in Azheekal.

"HOW do you explain this?" an exasperated government official at the 24-hour relief centre at the Kayamkulam taluk hospital in Alappuzha district asked. "They have lost everything, but they won't take the clothes voluntary agencies are dumping here. When food packets are offered, they demand to know whether the District Medical Officer has certified them as safe. Hundreds of food packets were buried. Nobody wants them. They will drink only mineral water. What do you call such behaviour: dignity, pride, or false pride? If only we had a mechanism to send all this to Tamil Nadu, at least the needy would have them."

But, unknown to such officials, piles of used clothing lay discarded in many relief camps in Tamil Nadu too. In the first few days, aid had poured in wholeheartedly, but unilaterally, without realising the needs of the intended recipients or respecting their dignity. At the temporary camp for 3,500 people in a school in Colachal (where the toll was 508) in Kanyakumari district, a handful of men were indignantly rummaging through the used clothes heaped on the school ground.

Stocks of mineral water, medicines, beddings and blankets and donations were pouring in at the relief camp office. The classrooms were crowded. The two-doctor medical centre had no major illness to deal with that day. In one corner, a decent meal was being served on plantain leaves to a group of about 30. But, some distance away, at the entrance to the relief camp office, a group of men and women were holding aluminium bowls with rice gruel and green gram. One of them, Mani, complained: "We see a lot of things going into the camp. But nothing eventually reaches us. We have been spending the nights in this playground where last week our dead were lying in rows."

At several places in this Christian-majority district, private camps have been organised, a lot of them within the premises of churches or schools run by church managements. Some have been sponsored by non-resident Indians, others by poor labourer volunteers. A large number of Hindu and Muslim organisations, political parties and voluntary organisations, a good many based in neighbouring Kerala, also responded sincerely to the rescue and relief efforts, according to relief camp managers in Colachal.

One relief worker in Kanyakumari district, Maria Stephen of the Rural Uplift Centre, told Frontline at Keezhemanakkudi (another badly affected village near Colachal, where over a hundred died, a new bridge was plucked away and the desolation after a week appeared scary) that the government was running such camps in a haphazard manner. There were a number of "unofficial relief camps" sprouting all over the district. "It is slowly leading to tension in these areas because the culture and traditions of the fisherfolk are entirely different from that of the people inland. Moreover, the traumatised victims in these camps are now scattered in the various camps, some far away from their homes and separated from their relatives and neighbours," she said.

In Kerala, the entrance to the taluk hospital in Kayamkulam (where the injured from the worst affected Alappad and Arattupuzha villages were being treated) wore the look of a polling centre on election day. Several makeshift "booths" had been opened by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Jama-at, the National Democratic Front, the People's Democratic Party and the Congress almost on a competitive basis to help the victims. In the initial days of the tragedy, as ambulances rushed in, the stretchers were borne by the volunteers of both Hindu and Muslim organisations. In the predominantly Hindu villages of Alappad and Arattupuzha, the Jama-at volunteers were in the forefront of the relief operations, along with RSS and Mata Amritanandamayi Mutt volunteers and representatives of many other agencies.

"But, as the initial impact of the tragedy wears out, the authorities fear, such competitive volunteerism and relief activity may cause trouble, especially in certain areas. Such camps have now been entrusted to the Army," the officer-in-charge at the Army-run relief camp at the Oachira Higher Secondary School said.

The chaos visible at the other camps was markedly absent at the Oachira camp, which had 4,832 inmates were staying. Entry to visitors was restricted. The "booths" were markedly absent. The inmates seemed well provided for. No one complained.

At Arattupuzha, the member-secretary of the Kerala State Legal Services Authority, District and Sessions Judge U. Saratchandran, told Frontline that the Authority has set up adalats in all affected areas for fast-track legal relief to the victims. They can approach the adalat if they have complaints about the relief, about documents being lost or even for quick decisions in pending cases. The Authority was trying to create awareness about such a fast-track mechanism through posters.

In most camps in Kerala, the basic necessities seemed to have been taken care of, 10 days after the initial chaos and confusion. In Alappad and Arattupuzha, which together accounted for 158 deaths, the government has promised a special rehabilitation scheme, to repair damaged houses in one year, to hold an adalat to issue duplicate ration cards and other documents, to supply fishing gear and study materials, and to restore power and water supply quickly. In both villages, round-the-clock ferry services were inaugurated on January 7 by Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, at locations where bridges - the long-pending demand of the villagers and the absence of which had resulted in the high toll - are to be built soon.

But every time they return home from the camps to take stock of the damage and to reflect on lost relatives, the villagers seem to relive those fateful "eight minutes".

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