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STATES:
GUJARAT
Double
Disaster
At the
centre of quake relief operations, the state Government's initial sloth
and confused response added to the loss and pain
By
Uday Mahurkar and Supriya Bezbaruah
A
fortnight after the killer earthquake of January 26 had numbed Ahmedabad
and decimated Kutch district, Gujarat conveyed a sense of hyperactivity.
Ahmedabad airport was handling nearly 100 flights each day and the air
force station in Bhuj another 60, each carting relief material. Road,
rail and telecom links had been restored; 33 sub-stations were operational
and providing electricity to nine towns and 557 villages; and nine towns
and 913 villages in Kutch were receiving piped drinking water. Rescue
work over, some 530 cranes, 291 bulldozers, and 2,679 removal vehicles
were clearing the debris in Kutch.
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| ILL-PREPARED:
The quake left Keshubhai overwhelmed. |
The sheer
scale of the exercise is mind-boggling. By February 7, the Gujarat Government
had received 3.9 lakh blankets, 1.1 lakh plastic sheets and 64,272 tents
for distribution to the 3.78 crore people affected by the quake. In the
five districts hit, 3,608 ration shops distributed 6,471 tonnes of foodgrain,
556 tonnes of vegetables, 349 tonnes of edible oil and 107 tonnes of milk
powder. These were apart from the relief material given out by voluntary
groups. To prevent an epidemic, the health services brought in five lakh
doses of measles vaccines, 500 tonnes of bleaching powder, 5,000 litres
of phenyl and 65 tonnes of anti-malarial drugs. The rescue and relief
operations involved 50,000 personnel, including 2,986 doctors and 5,536
paramedics.
Confronted
with a mega disaster that has led to an estimated 30,000 deaths (the official
body count hasn't crossed 17,000), both state and civil society have pulled
out all the stops. The efforts have even earned praise. Said Joe Barr
of the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination Committee, "Local
officials who have themselves been affected have done tremendously well.
They have gone and done their jobs. Nothing happens perfectly in a disaster."
Perfection
will always remain a pipe dream. But as Gujarat picks up the pieces, the
public debate is centred on the Government's response. How efficiently
did the official machinery react? Could it have done better? What are
the lessons the Gujarat quake holds for the future?
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| Basic
rescue equipment like cranes took too long arriving in Kutch. |
For a start,
the quake took the Government totally by surprise and entirely unprepared.
This state of unpreparedness was unwarranted. Chief Minister Keshubhai
Patel was campaigning in Bhavnagar on the morning of September 12 last
year when the city was rocked by a quake. It was one of the 80 tremors
Bhavnagar experienced since December 1999 that led to some 50,000 people
opting to sleep outdoors for 40 days at a stretch. Three days later, Keshubhai
sought to allay local fears by telling a press conference that it was
Bhuj and Vadodara that really had reason to worry about seismic activity.
Keshubhai
wasn't divulging a state secret. At a seminar on "Seismic Activity
in Kutch" organised by Banares Hindu University in Varanasi on December
22 last year, geologist S.S. Medh said there were enough indications that
Kutch would experience a high-intensity quake soon. Other participants
agreed. Two days later, Kutch was hit by a tremor of 4.0 on the Richter
scale. Says Mihir Bhatt of the Ahmedabad-based Disaster Management Institute:
"The Government wasn't prepared for the main film despite seeing
the trailer in Bhavnagar. That is its biggest failure."
Even if
it is impossible to predict either the timing or the epicentre of an earthquake,
it is clear that the Government was aware of the imminent possibility
of seismic activity in Kutch. A farsighted approach would have entailed
the establishment of a disaster-management plan in coordination with the
National Disaster Management (NDM) division of the Ministry of Agriculture
in Delhi. Unfortunately, neither the state nor the Centre was prepared.
What was lacking was concrete information of the resources available for
the quickest response to a disaster. For example, the services of the
National Remote Sensing Agency were not utilised to get an instant idea
of the scale of devastation and the location of affected areas. Neither
was there a pool of resources, like communication vans, cranes, gas cutters,
mobile hospitals and doctors for instant deployment. It was entirely a
fire-fighting, reactive approach marred by the lack of modern equipment
like infra-red cameras and sound-detecting instruments.
Compounding
the ill-preparedness was the slothful initial response of the state Government.
With telephone communications disrupted, the preliminary information before
the Government was that Ahmedabad had been the worst affected. Apart from
opening a control room in Gandhinagar, Keshubhai was at the Ahmedabad
police commissioner's office by 9.45 a.m. on Republic Day, less than an
hour after the quake. By 10.30 a.m., he requested army help but it was
another two hours before the soldiers went to the rescue of people.
The Met
office in Delhi knew about the intensity and epicentre of the quake almost
instantly. The details were communicated to Ahmedabad after 11.30 a.m.
due to link problems. However, thanks to officialdom's preoccupation with
the Republic Day parade, the cabinet secretary activated the Crisis Management
Group (CMG) after 12 noon. The CMG formally met at 3 p.m.-a six-hour delay-and
the Cabinet at 5 p.m.
The state
Government responded unsurely. At 2 p.m. a plane and a chopper with former
minister Ashok Bhatt, Additional Principal Secretary G. Subba Rao and
a team of doctors left for Bhuj. At 3 p.m., the first contact with Bhuj
was established. Says Keshubhai: "I could make contact with Bhuj
only around 3 p.m. when (Industries Minister) Suresh Mehta managed to
get in touch with me. The phone was disconnected in 30 seconds but Sureshbhai
told me Bhuj was completely devastated." The disconnection was because
the batteries of the satellite phone were running low.
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