Cover Story: Orissa; Journey to Kalinga: Bottle Neck

Far from being the nerve centre of relief operations, Prinicipal correspondent Sayantan Chakravarty finds Bhubaneswar's Kalinga Stadium mired inconfusion and red tape.

Rush, they said. And Inder Singh, a sturdy road warrior, jumped into his Tata truck, loaded with donations from the businessmen of Dehradun, and drove for a week and 1,700 km. At 2 p.m. on Children's Day he pulled into Bhubaneswar's Kalinga Stadium, the epicentre of relief distribution to Orissa's traumatised, hungry people. All he had to do was offload cartons of rusk biscuits and take a well-earned rest -- -- or so he thought.

FACTFILE

ť 500 trucks in a pile-up awaiting orders and fuel.
ť The stadium needs 100 officials, it has three..
ť At Gop, when a truck arrives, 542 families vie for a bag of puffed rice.
Problem: Trucks that should make daily trips are stuck at Kalinga Stadium, Bhubaneswar. Even when they get out, there is no method, no proper direction to the relief.

Nobody could tell Singh where to take his cargo, whom to meet, how to get fuel. At midnight, frustrated, hungry and tired, Singh is peeling potatoes, trying to get a flame going on his rusty stove. "I don't know who will unload the cartons, no one cares, it's madness," he says feebly. By noon the next day, Singh is still going around in circles, fighting hard to keep at bay a clutch of sniggering touts offering to lug his cargo -- -- "We're voluntary workers," they say -- -- to some remote villages. Singh's story is repeated with scandalous regularity by countless truckers who make their way either from distant corners of the country or from the railway warehouses to Kalinga Stadium.

The official machinery at the relief nerve centre just can't handle the volume of traffic, even though the seat of the bureaucracy, the Secretariat, is only 4 km away. Two small tables outside the stadium's giant entrance, a couple of phones and a make-shift control room handle over a hundred frustrated voices at any given point of time. The NGOs thus don't coordinate with the officials at the stadium, rushing supplies to areas that may not be on the priority list.

While Kalinga needs at least 100 officials, it has no more than three harried, overworked officials, who often slink away from their task of sending out relief and handling 500 truckers. "We were clearly not prepared for the enormity of the problem," admits A.K. Tripathi, chief coordinator for relief at Kalinga. "That's why the confusion is taking time to die out."

But Orissa's 1.26 crore storm-affected don't have time. Kalinga's confusion is causing desperation in 8,000 destitute villages. Chief Minister Giridhar Gamang says rather reluctantly to India Today, "I cannot work wonders." True. But at least he could begin by disciplining his officials; some spend entire afternoons at the Bhubaneswar Club.

And so truck driver Lakhinder Champati, 38, waiting with his truck in a serpentine queue at the railway yard, explains how in the two weeks after the cyclone he has made only four trips back and forth from Bhubaneswar to the stadium. A pity, because Champati wanted to carry out a trip every day but couldn't get past the bureaucratic bottleneck.

The actual distribution then is as bad. At Gop, a pit stop on the road to the coast, a convoy of trucks under police guard grinds to a halt. The convoy has arrived after a gap of three days. Hungry men and women swoop upon the convoy. They want to tear open the consignments, but the saner among them manage to keep grasping hands at bay. There's a small jute bag with puffed rice for 542 families. Each one gets a handful, literally, and moves away sullen faced.

Their plight is confounding because Gamang tells you "there is no shortage of food, in fact there is a glut". That's true. Thanks to nationwide attention, Kalinga Stadium received 34,000 tonnes of rice by November 15. Also about 2,500 kilolitres (KL) of petrol, nearly 7,000 KL of diesel, over 12,000 KL of kerosene and nearly 5,500 cylinders of cooking gas. "There is no shortage of rice," said Special Relief Commissioner D.N. Padhi. Yet thousands go hungry.

Other shortages are severe: Of 30 lakh saris needed, less than five lakh have come in; of 60 lakh garment pairs no more than 1.92 lakh; of 60 lakh utensil sets, only 50,000; of 1.40 crore anti-cholera and gastroenteritis tablets required, only 45 lakh are available.

Thus far the state machinery has spent about Rs 800 crore in the relief operations. Gamang promises to tone up his stumbling relief operations. "You see, I had to start my work with a single phone operating in the state; that was my communication link with the world."

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