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STATES:
GUJARAT
Lack
Of Departmental Coordination
In
a letter to India Today, former collector of Kutch Kamal Dayani says he
and Mehta "communicated the gravity of the situation to some of the
officials and ministers whom we could get on line in Gandhinagar within
60 and 90 minutes of the event and also asked for help". But Dayani's
version hasn't been corroborated.
Worse, the
state Government's responses were affected by lack of departmental coordination.
The control room in Gandhinagar learnt of the disaster in Bhuj at 3 p.m.
and its first contact with the Kutch collector was after midnight. The
crisis zone was thought to be Ahmedabad. The misreading delayed rescue
and cost lives.
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| LONG
WAIT: It took a fortnight before some of the affected villages in
Kutch got government relief. The induction of efficient officials
made a difference. |
The state
Government's inertia is being blamed on a team of officials around Keshubhai,
but particularly Chief Secretary L.N.S. Mukundan and Principal Secretary
P.K. Lahiri. They failed to rise to the occasion, not least because the
right officers weren't in the right place. Subba Rao, who was despatched
to Bhuj as relief coordinator on January 26, proved ineffective and returned
in four days. Says a senior official: "This Government runs away
from merit. All along it has encouraged sloth." It is a commentary
on the distortions of the bureaucracy that the officials who were finally
sent to Kutch to salvage the situation were precisely those who had been
sidelined by the regime till the quake.
The initial
delay and deployment of the wrong personnel led to one lapse after another.
On January 30, for example, 120 aircraft with relief material from overseas
remained unloaded even as people in as many as 150 villages were short
of food and blankets. At the same time, Bhuj, Anjar and Bhachau were faced
with a problem of plenty. There was absolutely no coordination.
Had the
Government made a quick estimate of damage in villages and set up control
panels at the entry points to Kutch, Maliya and Adesar, much of the relief
could have been diverted to villages right away. Instead there were some
villages like Vadala Thumbi, Faradri and Gundala in Kutch that hadn't
received any government relief even on the 13th day after the disaster.
There was no official help in some of these villages even to extricate
bodies.
The scenes
at the Bhuj collectorate were chaotic on the first four days. Relatives
of those trapped alive pleaded with officials for cranes but the callous
response was, "Get a crane on your own from anywhere. We'll pay for
it." In Gokul Apartment, Bhuj's tallest building, several people
died because there was no 30-tonne crane available by January 30.
Following
Home Minister L.K. Advani's two-day visit to Kutch, the appointment of
a new collector and a new relief coordinator, the organisation of relief
has witnessed a dramatic improvement. Nearly 75 food trucks have been
pressed into daily service for 21 distribution centres covering 60 villages.
Says Relief Coordinator L. Man Singh: "We are on top of the situation
now. Our only problem is a shortage of tents."
If this
focus and purposefulness were in evidence when disaster struck on January
26, there would have been many more hundreds alive in Kutch today. It
wouldn't have reduced the sense of loss. It may have just lessened the
pain of a people who have faced adversity with dignity and resilience.
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