While we were sleeping

Information is power when information is credible, timely, locally relevant, and widely accessible to the population. That information can literally be a matter of life and death is revealed by the report of an alert Indian working in Singapore who telephoned his native village in Pondicherry and warned about a possible tidal surge in the early hours of December 26. Such a simple act saved many lives. So also, a few years ago when a super cyclone hit Orissa, an alert port official in Paradweep kept tracking the storm on the Internet and helped guide a few ships to safety.

The first TV pictures of the unfolding tragedy came via Doordarshan only around 10.40 am. There have been very few reports of MMS, home video or web camera capturing the images of the devastation. Bare arsenal, indeed, for a nation that seeks to leapfrog into the information age.

There was a major earthquake off Antarctica about a week ago. Some scientists think that it had contributed to the build of seismic stress in the Sumatra region. Were our meteorologists aware of the possible threat? It is now clear that the Met office had barely noted the threat posed by the quake off Sumatra, and D-day being a Sunday, that information was not effectively utilised by any of the coastal authorities either.

The tsunami hit Sri Lanka just a little before 8 am; around 8 am, the tide had reached Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu. In another 40 minutes, the waves lashed Chennai, going up the coast to Vishakapatnam by 9 am. Just prior to the deluge, the sea retreated quite a long way back as if to draw its breath before the final punch. But there was no one to take note or warn people of this, an act that would have given people at least ten minutes to flee the beaches. And those who did see did not understand this phenomenon, including the coast guard, the navy and the port authorities.

At every stage, there was a shrinking window of opportunity to warn people. But nothing happened. A country that hopes to run the call centres of the world could not call its own people.

In a country that aspires to be a world power, it took 12 hours for news of the disaster that overcame the Air Force base in Car Nicobar island to trickle through. Is this the level of our defense preparedness, when New Delhi is supposedly a mere 20 minutes away from a Pakistani missile, and Karachi is in the same situation in the opposite direction? Also, it is no coincidence that two of the most affected regions, Nicobar and Aceh province in Indonesia, are among the most isolated and incommunicable. Even Indians need permission to go to Nicobar. Not surprisingly, this isolation actually made those people even more vulnerable.

In India, the flow of information has been in the stranglehold of various information and communications policies. Centralising information flow, as most governmets in India have tended to do, more often than not defeats the very purpose of that information. In fact, at the end it leaves even the government in a blind. It is no coincidence that even after 48 hours after the sea surges, no information was available from many parts of the affected areas, and consequently, speedy relief did not reach these areas.

In fifty years, we have barely been able to make basic telephone needs available to 5 per cent of the population. With the recent and hesitant reforms in the last ten years, we enhanced telephone density to 10 per cent by opening up mobile telephony. Internet access in India is among the lowest for a country that aspires to be a potential powerhouse in the information technology sector. We have done everything possible to retard the expansion of information, broadcasting and communication channels. We have spent years debating new opportunities opened up by rapid technological changes in areas like DTH, broadband, convergence, satellite access, but have actually done nothing that would enable us to seize these new opportunities.

In the aftermath of the tidal wave, the government announced its decision to set up a tsunami warning system. Point is, why is it that in spite of days of prior warning, cyclones and floods continue to kill thousands of people each year? Would a new tsunami warning system really help? Three days after the tsunami, even as reports of dire needs are pouring in from many corners, as shortage of potable water and food and threats of epidemic outbreaks are becoming a possibility, we think our national pride will be hurt if we accept help from abroad. Just as we let our people down by failing to raise an alarm in time, we now exhibit our resoluteness in sacrificing our own people rather than allow others to step in with facilities for clean water and medicine.

Information is power. Free flow of information using the whole range of communication technologies is the best way to empower the people. For a country that proposed Satyameva Jayate, rather than be shaken by the tsunami, we should use this crisis to shake off the shackles on information. Let the truth prevail.

The writer is the director of Liberty Institute, a Delhi-based think tank