| |
DEATHQUAKE;
LOOKING BACK
Latur: Still Shaken
Seven
years later, survivors of Latur try to cope with the quake's after effects
By
Sandeep
Unnithan
Gangadhar
Legade, a 30-year-old tailor of Killari village, can't forget Black Thursday.
Seven years ago, on September 30, 1993, his village was the epicentre
of a 6.4 tremblor. The quake flattened 52 villages in the two districts
of Latur and Osmanabad. When the dust had settled in the pre-dawn mayhem,
nearly 10,000 people lay dead and 16,000 injured.
 |
| GREAT
LEVELLER: A stony burial for one of Latur's dead in 1993 |
Killari,
with a population of over 20,000, was completely destroyed and over 1,400
persons killed. Legade's wife and two sons were among the dead. His grandmother
Vimlabai had built four houses for each of her grandchildren, including
Legade, all within sight of each other. Those few seconds brought down
all four houses and killed her.
Seven years
later, it's a resurrected Killari that sits on either side of the Latur-Umerga
road, 2 km away from the shell of the old village. Beneficiary of the
four-year Rs 1,800-crore Maharashtra Emergency Earthquake Rehabilitation
Programme, Killari now boasts of nearly 3,000 concrete houses. The neat
single-storey houses stick in of the brown landscape.
But such
efforts have not been able to help people like Legade overcome their trauma.
Legade - who has since remarried and has two children - lives in a tin
shed near his concrete house. He can't seek refuge in the house allotted
to him as it could collapse upon him. Legade now suffers from insomnia
and anxiety. "What is the solution to all this?" he asks.
 |
| LIFE
ON THE EDGE: Afraid of another Big One, residents of Latur today prefer
to dwell in tin sheds next to their government build flats |
The spanking
new government-built concrete houses have an eerie resemblance to potemkin
villages. For what catches the eye are the corrugated tin sheds built
by the villagers adjoining nearly all these 3,000 houses. Like the air-raid
shelters in war-scarred cities, these are for the people of Latur to retreat
into when the ground trembles.
With the
twin districts falling in a moderate-risk seismicity zone, tremors are
ironically a routine occurrence with a frequency of at least once a month,
say villagers. Most of them have slept in these sheds ever since the quake,
using the concrete houses only for cooking and recreation. "We don't
want to be caught by surprise again," says farmer Moinuddin Mullah,
who watched his neighbours entombed as they slept. For the villagers the
tin sheds mark an abdication of faith in concrete structures. For others,
they are a thumbs down for the abysmal quality of construction.
Inside a
house handed over to a villager two years ago, Shankar Padsalgi, the wizened
sarpanch of Killari, uses his walking stick to tap out chunks of plaster.
The floors and ceilings are poorly finished. In other houses, huge cracks
have begun snaking through the walls. Not exactly the signs that would
inspire confidence in their new occupants. Poor construction is evident
even in the villages reconstructed by donor agencies. The reason? Common
contractors were used. For survivors like Legade, it's a double whammy.
Reeling under personal traumas, the callousness of such builders has only
worsened their plight. "Most of these townships are irrelevant to
the lifestyles of the villagers-they're like apartment units in towns
complete with attached baths and toilets," says Mumbai-based architect
P.K. Das, who designed a 40-house township in Chincholi Kate in Latur
district after consulting villagers.
To be sure,
the scale of the state Government's rebuilding project was staggering.
Nearly Rs 800 crore from a World Bank loan was spent constructing over
30,000 new houses. Around 8,400 houses were built by donor agencies. Some
1.97 lakh houses in the two districts were retrofitted with quake-resistant
material and destroyed villages were relocated and rebuilt. Additional
Collector D.R. Bansod, overseeing earthquake rehabilitation, admits some
houses developed cracks since the concrete bricks were not properly cured.
"We had severe water shortage in May 1998. But the rest of the houses
have been certified by seismic experts from IIT Mumbai."
Being the
focus of millions of dollars worth of aid and free foodgrains, the people
simply stopped working. "Villagers are now victims of the 'dependence
syndrome' they expect the Government to provide everything," says
Bansod. After a five-year waiver of utility bills and land revenue, which
ended in 1998, the state Government is finding it difficult to collect
taxes. State officials say relief should not last for more than a month.
"The focus should be on making the villagers self-sufficient as quickly
as possible," says Bansod.
But it's
the extent of psychological trauma that's difficult to gauge. Dr Rajesh
Parikh, a neuropsychiatrist at Mumbai's Jaslok Hospital, says, "Studies
done in Latur reveal the magnitude of psychological damage in people is
directly proportional to the extent of devastation and casualties in their
area. A psychological study of 2,152 individuals in the earthquake-affected
area in Latur, found 40 per cent of them had turned suicidal, and over
60 per cent suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There were cases
of families avoiding meals together as they didn't want to face each other,
or talk about deaths within the family. Then, of course, there is the
omnipresent existentialist dilemma that hampered people from getting back
to routine life.
It's a chilling
reminder of how an earthquake's destructive power can be magnified by
official ineptitude.
-with Natasha Israni
Top
|
|
PHOTO GALLERY
