Disaster, the great leveller

The swathe of disasters from Kutch and Gujarat through Myanmar, Indonesia and now China, and the tremendous toll they took in terms of life...

The swathe of disasters from Kutch and Gujarat through Myanmar, Indonesia and now China, and the tremendous toll they took in terms of life, social disruption and economic loss require some thinking out of the box. The managerial responses to disaster management, as unfolded at a ministerial conference on disaster management held at Delhi, are a beginning, but it is as yet not quite clear that the drills and systems they advocate help in saving lives and property significantly. Modern communications, system designs, etc are going to be ultimately an important part of the amelioration of the great social tragedies that unfold themselves. Yet the socio-economic paradigm that is needed to make significant progress in reducing and containing vulnerability in large, populous Asiatic societies doesn8217;t seem to be on board as yet.

Let us get some 8220;fashionable8221; contrafactuals out of the way. It is true that it is mainly the poor who suffer from food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition. But not all poor people are equally vulnerable to disaster, and it is not always mostly the poorest who are exposed to the greatest risks. There are many other factors that determine vulnerability. These include the risk of exposure to crises, stress and shocks. There is also the population that is subjected to risk by civil breakdowns and violence on a communal scale. Poor people will suffer since access to resources will be limited, but in crises created by nature or man, people who are well off will also be vulnerable. I have seen communities with purchasing power deprived for days and weeks of access to the basic necessities of life. In populous Asiatic societies, we are talking of a social and not sectional disaster. Sometimes our rules, particularly of protection police and economic finance and credit solace, don8217;t take this into account. It would be useful to develop newer protocols with fresh mindsets.

Paradoxically, fast economic development without corresponding development in civil society organisations can lead to greater vulnerability.To begin with, the wealth involved is unimaginably larger as compared to the last occasion in a society growing at Chinese, Indian or East Asian growth rates. I was caught in the century8217;s worst Saurashtra cyclone in 1982 and the state asked me to chair the Kutch Earthquake Relief Advisory Committee 20 years later. When you grow the way Gujarat does, you almost double wealth every eight years or so. I am a trained econometrician, but I could see that past memory banks and statistics are irrelevant. We quickly worked out that the state had lost a significant part of its housing stock which is an inheritance of centuries and the replacement value of which is very high. The numbers of houses destroyed in western China tell a similar story.

I went to Kunming a few years ago, chairing a Rajiv Gandhi Foundation delegation. Incidentally, since nature does not respect political boundaries, Kunming is probably not more than an hour and a half by plane from Arunachal Pradesh, where some of the largest hydel projects in the world are on the drawing board. I empathise with Mani Shankar Aiyar and Jairam Ramesh in their exhortations to open up the Northeast, with its historical communication links with the Mekong and other regions, rather than enclose them within 8220;Inner Lines8221;. A Malayalee priest well-versed in the martial arts of Kerala formulated Kung Fu and went to China from the Northeast rather than from Ladakh, from where the Avalokiteshwara proceeded. Chinese legends attribute magical qualities to him. The Northeast can be the strong arm of India to the East just as Kashmir is with regard to Central Asia.

Earthquakes are natural, but as you grow fast, damage depends on land use, the nature of development and the ability of social and governance institutions to cope. Conceptually, disaster management in this perspective is at a rudimentary level in India, and I suspect in the rest of Asia as well, and experience-sharing has to be societal rather than only technical and official.

Incidentally, I really don8217;t know how to handle corruption as an issue here. When speed is of the essence, financial rules are a non sequitur and yet public monies have to be accounted for. When I was asked this I would weakly talk of vigilance rules but this needs fresh thinking. The Japanese claim that if a Richter Scale 8 earthquake hits central Tokyo, in half an hour everyone would have been contacted. In our case, it takes around eight hours for outside assistance to reach the victims. We know that the greatest loss is in the first few hours. In Gujarat, I would always ask officers to be sent to Japan for training in the management of very large and densely populated regions 8212; nobody else has the resources and experience that the Japanese do. But when you see the large crowd of schoolchildren visiting the Tokyo Disaster Management Centre, you know it is not just about resources and technology. Ultimately, it is people who matter.

India has a tradition of collaborating with and assisting people in traumatic situations. Let8217;s do it again.

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The writer is a former Union minister for power, planning and science, and was vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi yalaghgmail.com