June 22, 1998

Despite early warning, the Gujarat government reacts with fatal sloth as hundreds die needlessly in a cyclone.

By Uday Mahurkar

It was mid-morning when a perplexed Premjibhai Jayanthibhai watched the sky grow dark. The rumble of thunder mingled with a wind that blew in from the sea at 100 kmph and howled like a million souls in agony. This was, after all, normally a time of cloudless skies in the sweaty, treeless salt pans of Kutch. Jayanthibhai, a salt worker, quickly realised that something was very wrong. A fierce, driving rain began to lash the pans on the morning of June 9. Within six hours floodwaters surged around this settlement of salt and port workers near the port of Kandla.

As Jayanthibhai, his family and 28 others clambered onto the roof of his two-storeyed house to escape tides surging as high as 20 ft, a particularly large swirl struck his home like a thunderclap. The house crumbled and as Jayanthibhai desperately clung to the remnant of a pillar, he watched with horror as his two daughters, his wife and everyone else were dragged into the roiling waters. "It was worse than the curse of Durvasa (a mythical sage who pronounced calamitous curses)," says a stunned Jayanthibhai, as he recuperates in Kandla's Rambaug hospital.

He's one of the lucky ones. The stench of death nauseates the living in the hospital. Trucks laden with corpses rumble in periodically. The lobby and hall are makeshift mortuaries. For the first time, this bustling coast of India's industrial heartland faced a terror that is so familiar to the east: the destructive power of a cyclone. True, the storm was a natural catastrophe, but a bigger disaster was the government's abject failure to react in time, despite being warned in advance.

The destroyed property, mangled ships, ports, industries and vehicles -- totally valued at Rs 3,000 crore at least -- could not have escaped their fate. What could have been saved was human life. More than 1,500 people perished around the port of Kandla, where the storm spent the worst of its fury. Another 200 died in the coastal districts of Jamnagar, Junagadh and Rajkot. Official figures put the toll at 600, plus 100 missing, but that figure, as rescue workers and reporters confirm, is a gross understatement. The toll could in any case rise further because many bodies were washed out to sea. Most of the bodies recovered were those found clinging to poles, trees or fished out of Kandla creek.

The scenes of physical destruction indicated the power of the storm. About 15 ships sank in Kandla port, one of India's largest and the gateway for petroleum imports for western India. The port is now closed. Giant cranes, mangled by violent whirlpools of storm winds, litter the ravaged landscape like confetti. The cyclone scooped up two ships and tossed them onto national highway 8A as if they were paper boats. Dozens of tankers, jeeps and trucks swept away in the maelstrom littered the area around the road to Gandhidham, 14 km from Kandla. The salt pans of Kandla have simply been washed clean.

In the industrial boom town of Jamnagar, the loss of life was low, but the devastation was widespread. Most of the semi-permanent houses of 50,000 workers constructing a giant Reliance refinery were blown away. Some 60 people died here, either buried in house collapses or struck by flying hoardings and metal sheets. Not a single roof or hoarding remained intact in the town. It was a warning to India's industrial powerhouse that economic advances without an efficient administration cannot match the vicissitudes of nature.

As always, it was a case of a state government reacting scandalously late to storm warnings. The cyclone was being monitored after it formed over the Arabian sea near the Lakshadweep islands on June 4 and moved north. Warnings for Gujarat were issued by 12:30 p.m. on June 7. "We had issued a cyclone warning for the entire Saurashtra and Kutch coastline, which includes Kandla," says R.K. Kankane, director, Indian Meteorological Department, Ahmedabad. By the morning of June 8, danger signal eight (windspeed exceeding 100 kmph) was issued specifically for Kandla port. There was a clear 24 hours to move people out from around the port. That same night, the district administration of Kutch was specifically and urgently informed of the cyclone coming their way. The least the authorities could have done was to switch on warning sirens and begin evacuation. Nothing of the sort was done. On June 9, at 10:30 a.m., as officials were still dithering, the storm struck the port.

As always, so many need not have died. Two settlements of 9,000 people, mostly shacks of salt workers and port labourers, at Sarwa village near Kandla, about a kilometre inland, were just swept away. They just didn't know a storm was on the way. "When the tides came in, everyone ran like mad men," says weeping salt worker Pravin Mulji, another survivor who lost his family and everything else. "But the water washed them away."

As always, the finger-pointing has begun. "The government just cannot escape responsibility," says the BJP's sworn foe and former chief minister Shankarsinh Vaghela. "It showed criminal negligence in ignoring the warning signals." The government has its excuse, however amazing and irresponsible it may sound. "The land the victims were living on belonged to the Kandla port trust and its authorities should have issued the warnings," argues state industry minister and former chief minister Suresh Mehta. "The government took adequate measures within its own limits, wherever it had been warned."

Try telling that to the survivors and the voluntary organisations which moved in to help when the government reacted with a caterpillar-like pace. Streams of workers from the government's own supporting cast, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the RSS, helped the army and the Border Security Force fish out bodies and distribute food. "The government machinery has failed," says VHP worker Jayantibhai Prajapati in Kandla. "We cannot defend it."

When the cyclone was about to strike, the ministers in charge of the districts (the state Government has assigned districts to ministers for administrative supervision) stayed on in the air-conditioned environs of their homes and offices in Gandhinagar. "The new, people-friendly image, which the BJP Government in the state has been trying to cultivate, took a severe beating due to its lethargy in meeting the cyclone threat," admits a senior party leader. For the families of the people who died needlessly in the killer cyclone, that is little comfort.

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