September 7,1998

After Malpa was wiped off the map, Principal Correspondent Sayantan Chakravarty and Deputy Chief Photographer Pramod Pushkarna, the first journalists to reach the area, were witness to raw courage overwhelmed by depressingly familiar callousness and confusion.

I see the vultures, rising on the freezing updrafts of the Himalayas. Vultures aren't supposed to be here, 8,000 ft above sea level. But they are the only visible signs of life dotting an angry, grey sky as the frail Chetak helicopter sways nervously in the wind. Our pilot is tense as he squeezes his craft between the rocky bluffs -- one cliff is Nepal, the other India -- that rear on both sides of us. This dangerous, narrow passageway is the only route to our destination, Malpa, a remote Himalayan hamlet of seven huts, once a pit stop on the long, treacherous road to holy Mt Kailash and Mansarovar lake. It is where the carrion-eaters are headed too.

Below us, under a heap of rocks two storeys high, are the crushed, broken remains of Malpa. On August 18, death came thundering down when a neighbouring mountain, weakened by incessant rain, simply fell on it. Within 90 seconds, Malpa and the 200 people there ceased to exist. The Indian Air Force helicopter floats down uncertainly to the table-sized clearing beside the raging Kali river. From this "helipad", at least 150 bodies have to be taken away after being extricated from their rocky graves.

It is an impossible task. Eight days and 150 helicopter sorties since that fateful stormy night, only 32 bodies have been pulled out of the devastation by the 80 people labouring at the site. Many bodies will never leave here. It is not for lack of trying; it is just that the collapsed mountain is immovable with the meagre tools at hand. So great was the mountain fall that the raging Kali was forced from its old bed; its torrent now pounds against the confining rocks as it tries to make sense of its altered course.

On the shore, I take one look at the bodies that have been pulled out by the toiling Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and army jawans and realise they would be better off mingling with the mud under the broken mountain. Decomposition has taken over, putrefying liquid spills from the crumbling flesh, and the faces are smashed beyond recognition. Only a few shards of skull remain to help the horrified families piece them together. For the handful of survivors and their rescuers, this is a nightmare come alive.

Take Chanchal Singh, one of the only 10 survivors of the landslide. Like paper in the wind, he was plucked from his house by a powerful blast of air in advance of the falling mountain and blown away. Seconds later he was interred in the torrent of water and rocks that descended from nearly 3,000 ft above. Singh, 21, lay motionless under a rock for two nights, immobilised by a fractured hand and shock. For two days he stared at the headless torso of his cousin lying under a mammoth boulder before a rescue team heard his moans. The landslide claimed his mother, sister and brother; ironically, they were on their way to attend a cremation. Numbed and devastated, Chanchal Singh is still grateful to the spirit of the men who struggled into Malpa and dug him out virtually with their bare hands. I watch, shocked, as rescuers without masks, gloves and protective equipment go about their grim task. There are no bulldozers here, no jackhammers.

Mohinder Singh, 31, an ITBP jawan, stoically pulls out anything that resembles flesh or bone. The fact that the unrelenting, driving rain -- unprecedented volumes have fallen in this area -- might trigger another giant landslide does not stop his frantic work. There are other heroes. I meet Anil Kumar, a road-construction engineer who, after escaping the night of horror, managed to overcome his own shock to carve out the makeshift helipad where we landed. It allowed the first rescuers to land at Malpa at 10 a.m. on August 22, shortly after the weather cleared for the first time in four days since the landslide.

But the heroics of a few crumble before the collective governmental callousness that is ignominiously repeated every time a disaster strikes India. I see this national disgrace play itself out at Malpa too. Seven days after the tragedy, I watch as the district administration fail to put together even half a dozen stretchers to ferry the dead and the injured at Dharchula. Helicopter pilots fight the stench of decomposing bodies that are dumped in twos and threes into the narrow space behind them. There's no sign of body bags. Plastic bags do arrive a week late: but they are large enough only for infants.

Everywhere in the world, relatives and friends of disaster victims are given succour, comfort and that vital crutch -- information. Not in India. Not in Malpa. Swarms of grief-stricken relatives looking for information on the 60 pilgrims who perished aimlessly wander around the base camp of Dharchula. I saw the same frustrated faces the previous day at the air force base at Bareilly where forlorn relatives took catnaps on the tarmac in between spells of official confusion. At Dharchula self-important officials elevate goofing-up to an art: an announcement is made on August 23 declaring that the body of dancer Protima Gauri Bedi had been found. It is a miserable hoax. Two days later, convinced that they wouldn't find her ever again, her sister and a colleague from Nrityagram, Bangalore, finally began the long journey back, hurt, angry and anguished.

As always, a disaster becomes a time of scandalous one-upmanship among officials trying to gain quick publicity. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kalyan Singh flew from Lucknow to Bareilly, merely to tell the press about his Government's plans to take a fresh look at development in the unstable Himalayas; he had nothing to say about the living, and no, he had no plans to fly to Dharchula to say anything to those who mourned. Neither did his Government, which did nothing in the four days it had to gather its wits.

At the district hospital in Dharchula where the dead lie, I see a sight that no one in a civilised nation should see. Bodies were strewn for several hours in the open -- like so much garbage. No one has brought formalin, bleaching-powder preservatives and sprays to keep the unbearable stench away. There isn't even ice. Instead there's supreme ignorance. L.R. Yadav, district magistrate of Pithoragarh, insists that bringing ice from elsewhere in the hills or even Bareilly would be foolhardy; it would melt, you see, though it could be in Dharchula in less than an hour. Belatedly, some one takes the decision to fly the bodies to mortuaries at Pithoragarh. But it's too late. The rotting bodies are falling apart. Eight bodies flown in from Malpa on August 23 lie at the helipad at Dharchula; there is no arrangement to pick them up for over an hour.

The official chaos was close to unbelievable. And so the rescue helicopters had to fly ridiculously, and dangerously, close to the mountains on the Indian side, all because the air force had not been told by the district administration that Nepal had granted permission to use its airspace. At the Dharchula base camp no one thought of appointing a spokesman, or someone who could coordinate the activities of the air force, army, ITBP, Ministry of External Affairs, state administration and the Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam. The result: information flowed in wildly different directions, like the tributaries of the river below.

As always, there are lessons to be learnt from the tragedy at Malpa. There are lessons to be learnt from the ineptitude of the Government. As always, no lessons will be learnt. It is unlikely that Malpa will encourage the Government to formulate what a disaster-ridden country desperately needs: a disaster-relief plan.

As the helicopter begins its ascent from ravaged Malpa to safety, I realise how, in times of crisis, so much in India depends on the courage and commitment of so few. The weather is still foreboding, yet, whenever they can, the young pilots of Operation Snow Tiger plunge into the treacherous valley of death. And there, amidst the stench from the fallen mountain, the grim work of the men moving its rocky remains to reach the dead continues, silent and lonely. Unlike the government they work for, these men know the wisdom of the old Chinese saying, "The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."

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