Total disaster zone

There’s no stopping nature’s fury. Every country has to contend with phenomena like tornadoes and cyclones, tidal waves and floods. But while some emerge from such dates with disaster relatively unscathed, others pay dearly in terms of human life. What makes the crucial difference between life and death in such instances is an effective warning network coupled with efficient evacuation systems. Tuesday’s twister that hit West Bengal and Orissa has already taken a toll of over 200 lives with thousands left homeless, injured and in absolute misery. By any yardstick, these figures are unacceptably high and demonstrate that either the warning systems had failed, or that district authorities were lackadaisical in responding to them. Just one tragedy, in that sea of trouble, suffices to highlight the fatal lacunae: some 40 children were killed in a school in Raipatna, after the school building collapsed. What were they doing there when a cyclonic storm was brewing? If this isn’t an administrative blunder ofmonstrous proportions, what is?

While the Indian Meteorological Department claims that warnings to state government officials as well as to AIR and Doordarshan stations were issued, from all accounts they seem to have been of a general nature. Weathermen were totally in the dark about the actual intensity and path of the storm. In fact, according to some news reports, it was meteorological scientists in Delhi who had first sighted the disturbance on their radar screens at around noon on Tuesday. They in turn alerted their counterparts in Bhubaneswar and Calcutta, but by then it was clearly too late to take the necessary precautionary measures. If, however, the local stations in the affected states had tracked it down themselves, some valuable time — and lives — could have been saved. Cyclone data trickles in from two basic sources: the Indian Meteorological Department with its observation network of cyclone detection radars and the INSAT 1-B satellite of the Department of Space. If India has to switchfrom the disaster mitigation to the disaster preparedness mode, these resources had better be shored up.

As if this great human tragedy unfolding before the nation’s eyes was not enough, it was also witness to the unedifying spectacle of its political leaders squabbling over the composition of the Central team that was to visit the affected region. In Parliament, the Opposition alleged that the BJP-led coalition had put together a team with an eye on its own political interests rather than those of the victims. While the accusation does ring true, given the fact that while Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress was included, MPs from the Left parties were not, there was nothing preventing anyone who was truly concerned, including local MPs, from reaching the disaster area on their own. In times like this, there is really no "ruling party" and "opposition", there is only the concerned and the indifferent — and, of course, the living and the dead.