|
|
|
|
METRO TODAY | DAILY NEWS | ASTROLOGY | ARCHIVES | INDIA TODAY | HOME |
|
|
ORISSA CYCLONE
AFTERMATH: THE TASK Rebuilding Orissa A nation rushes aid to desolate Orissa. Yet the miseries of its people worsen. Setting things right will be a test of of India's character. The task is daunting -- one crore destitute, 13 lakh homes to be rebuilt, seven lakh people needing medical help, 30,000 industries to be restarted, 10,000 km of road to be reconstructed. By Avirook Sen October 29 pitted man against nature in coastal Orissa. It was a walkover. Twenty-five foot tidal surges; wind speeds of 260 kmph (when coconuts fly nearly as fast as bullets), it just had to be that way. But the aftermath has pitted man against man. And man is losing.
The typhoon has warped the psyche of a people. Their minds have turned as insidious as the sea that crept upon them. They fight everywhere. Over wrecked homes, wretched relief -- -- and ruined lives. Those who have nothing to fight over, as in Ersama, give you a guided tour of the giant graveyard. Men will take you to their homes to show you the rotting bodies of wives and children in knee-deep water more than two weeks after the storm. But the cyclone seems to have affected the people it apparently spared. Politicians fight -- -- with the same lack of dignity as those scrambling for a kilo of rice -- -- over whether Orissa's doomsday is a "national calamity" or a "disaster of rare severity". Political parties adopt districts: with free food, they sell the party on the side.
Don't expect Orissa to be rebuilt soon. As if it wasn't bad enough. The damage is around Rs 7,000 crore, equivalent to four times the state's annual plan expenditure. There are more than one crore people who must be fed, clothed and given medicare because most of them are barely in a position to do these things on their own. As many as 13.5 lakh homes have been destroyed. A standard asbestos roofed Indira Awas Yojana home costs Rs 20,000 to build. Even that is not exactly storm-proof. And then, there are the trees. Over 60 lakh of them form roadblocks in some places, archways at the gates of hell in others. If rebuilding Orissa also means reforesting the state, it will cost Rs 500 a tree over three years to replace the ones that have fallen.
The numbers matter, for they bring home to us hard the sweeping scale of the work to be done. But numbers and figures tell us nothing about suffering. It is hard to give pain a statistic. Months from now, even weeks, Orissa will be an old story, forgotten with time. The concern, so silent and minimal as it is, will have vanished like the sea will have from their homes. But hardship has no regular tides, it does not recede so easily. For these people, the cliche that life will never be the same again fits perfectly. Healing is a slow process, a wretched one. In a way we cannot help Orissa. None of the blankets and candles and milk powder that have been sent can make up for a son washed away, a wife still not accounted for. There are some wounds relief cannot suture.
But a shoulder helps, an outstretched hand helps; as Orissa weeps India must ensure it does not weep alone. As a nation we can be remarkably indifferent, too caught up in our own lives to find time to grieve. But adversity brings with it opportunity, and the cyclone in Orissa offers us one. To shrug off our apathy and display that the re-building of a shattered state is a nation's responsibility. If we fail them we would have failed ourselves. |
||||||||||||||||
| Top |
 BUSINESS TODAY | INDIA TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS TODAY Write to us | Subscriptions | Advertise with
us |
