After shock

The stunned faces of the survivors of Fridayacirc;euro;trade;s earthquake, the injured crying in pain, the dead and the dying, anxious ...

January 29, 2001 12:00 AM IST

4 min read

The stunned faces of the survivors of Fridayacirc;euro;trade;s earthquake, the injured crying in pain, the dead and the dying, anxious relatives awaiting endlessly for news of missing family members and friends, images like these from Gujarat will long remain in our collective consciousness. This is not the first time that the country has had to face up to a disaster of this magnitude and it certainly will not be the last. Events like these always test the will and wisdom of the nation and its capacity to act as one. Of course, it doesnacirc;euro;trade;t always happen that way. Some of the victims of the supercyclone that visited Orissaacirc;euro;trade;s coast in November 1999 are still struggling with their tattered lives. Hopefully, history will not repeat itself in Gujarat.

But first we have to get the priorities right. If thinking has clarity, follow-up action will be focused and commensurately effective. For the moment, there are only three big acirc;euro;tilde;Racirc;euro;trade;s on the national radar screen: rescue, relief and rehabilitation. This phase should receive all that weacirc;euro;trade;ve got, from rescue teams and bulldozers to generators and mobile surgical units. And not just in the places where the TV cameras go, but in regions where they donacirc;euro;trade;t, where there is no one to see ordinary people struggling to cope with devastation in terrifying oblivion. Help has already begun to pour in, both at the national and international level, but it would be of little use to anyone if the various state and central agencies involved in managing the disaster donacirc;euro;trade;t come together and coordinate operations in a planned and rational fashion. You cannot have a band-aid response to a reversal of these proportions. Today the country has one big advantage that it did not when the Uttarkashi earthquake struck in 1991 or when Laturhappened in 1993 it has made a quantum leap in information technology and this, hopefully, should make all the difference to the efficiency of relief operations.

The Republic Day earthquake does raise numerous questions about the quality of the countryacirc;euro;trade;s development and disaster preparedness, about the nature of its urban planning, about the character of its housing construction, questions that donacirc;euro;trade;t have easy answers. For the moment, however, there is no getting away from the fact that earthquakes will continue to be part of our lives, perched as we are on a vast land plate floating on an ocean of molten rock: according to informed estimates, 57 per cent of the country is prone to earthquakes. The tremors of the recent earthquake were felt as far away as Tamil Nadu and Delhi. Incidentally, Kutch was hit by an earthquake in 1819 and the Sindree fort that once guarded its coastline there had collapsed under its assault. Yet, we seem to have learnt almost nothing from the past. While itacirc;euro;trade;s true that earthquakes cannot be predicted, the fact remains that while the 1993 Latur earthquake left over 10,000 dead, the one that had visited Los Angeles some 22 years earlier wasfar more severe but killed 55. One of the reasons for the heavy death tolls in India is its high population density. But it is also true that the country has not internalised any of the lessons it has learnt from encounters with death on a mass scale.

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