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EDITORIAL
Chaos
Theory
Why
India is as likely to be crowned Miss World as Calamity Jane
 Like
some unfailing karmic process chaos follows calamity in India. Over the
past week and more, the country has repeatedly been told that it is well
nigh impossible to predict an earthquake. Fair enough; but whatever happened
to the crisis management drill? Information was still slow to flow. Till
early afternoon on January 26, the Union Government was talking of "200-odd
people" having died and blissfully unaware of the state of an air
base in a frontier state. The National Centre for Calamity Management,
which should have become the nodal agency within minutes of the seismic
storm, is a body that exists only in policy proposals. After earthquakes
such as the one in Latur-where 10,000 people were killed in 1993-it was
decided that a "special commando force" would be put together
and equipped with the best rescue technology in business, complete with
access to a computerised database. A comprehensive evacuation scheme would
also be outlined. Has anybody heard of these ideas since?
Consider
what happened after the earthquake. Valiant fire brigade and police teams
went on salvage missions with crowbar-level machinery: huge crushing machines,
cranes, spades. The rest of the world is talking of using industrial robots
for precisely such a role. To offer another example, industrial thermal
imaging equipment saved lives after the Turkish earthquake of 1999. Technology,
as the efforts of better-prepared foreign teams have shown in Gujarat,
can facilitate recovery-provided the world's "it superpower"
is alive to it. This past month's tragedy is scarcely unique. During the
Orissa cyclone of 1999, district officials were reduced to logging on
to an American website to keep track of nature's fury. Such a chalta hai
(anything goes) attitude is great for a joke book. After the earthquake,
it only leaves India feeling sick in the stomach.
Taxing
Tremors
An earthquake cess has to be followed up by transparent
accounting
 The
economic scare caused by the Gujarat earthquake is logical, if not realistic.
After all it is India's fastest growing state and the second-most industrialised.
On the face of it, the Union Government is more than justified in imposing
a calamity tax to fund the reconstruction of Gujarat. But the problem
is not in justifying a calamity tax. The doubt is over the kind of taxation
and the use of the money raised through such taxes. By the Government's
own admission, the lesson from the taxation reforms of the past 15 years
has been to reduce tax rates and expand the tax base. That lesson is also
valid for any temporary tax measure, which a calamity tax is. But the
preaching has seldom been put to practice. Almost always a surcharge has
been imposed on personal income tax to raise funds for ad hoc relief-the
Gujarat surcharge of two percentage point being no exception. This amounts
to overtaxing the existing taxpayers. Government should have instead netted
the classes that pay the least taxes-doctors, lawyers and exporters, to
name only three.
The next
task should be to ensure transparency in the use of tax money. A simple
way to do it is to prepare a separate account for calamity taxes and disclose
the item-wise inflow and outflow from the account at the end of the year.
That's what many relief funds do and hence enjoy more credibility with
the people than the Government does. The outpouring of contributions for
Kargil, Orissa and drought relief funds run by NGOs testifies to this.
No one minds doing his or her bit for the reconstruction of Gujarat. For
a strong Gujarat means a strong India. But everybody minds shelling out
money to a government that is secretive with its accounts and inefficient
in its spending.
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