On 26 December 2004, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck of the coast of Indonesia; it caused a vast tsunami that raked the east coast of India and Sr Lanka. I wrote this piece about it in Business World of 29 December 2004.
Caring for
survivors
The scale and the horror of the disaster
that has struck the people along the east coast of India – and of Sri Lanka –
are unimaginable. The toll of people swallowed by the wave itself runs into
thousands. They have left behind on the coast many more people who have been
injured, whose families have been shattered, whose homes have collapsed, and
whose livelihood has been washed away.
Fingers have
been pointed at the meteorological department. The underwater earthquake, it is
said, occurred two hours before the tsunami hit the east coast; there was time
for a warning, it has been alleged. This is pointless. Governments set up
agencies to watch for disasters that may happen once in a blue moon. But such
agencies can never have enough practice in spotting events that seldom happen.
That is how the US missed all signs of the Indian nuclear ceremony; that is how
Chernobyl and the Three Mile incident happened. Rather than try to predict the
unpredictable, it would be wiser to invest effort in dealing with the aftermath
of unpredictable events.
India is
supposed to be doing precisely that, with considerable assistance from the
World Bank. The home ministry has set up a natural disaster management
division, which in turn has asked the thirteen coastal states to set up
steering committees under the chief secretary and to formulate a disaster
management policy. Stirred by the imminent arrival of an appraisal mission from
the World Bank, the home ministry had urgently called a meeting of state representatives
just five days before the wave hit India. The state governments were also asked
to put forward projects such as cyclone shelters, shelterbelt plantations,
regeneration of mangrove swamps, construction of embankments and of missing
road links. It is sobering that while a good argument can be made for each of
these measures, none would have really helped in the aftermath of the tidal
wave.
What would have
helped are certain selected elements of the general development process. For
instance, the casualties of a catastrophe land up in public hospitals. To cope
with unexpected disasters, hospitals need excess capacity. But far from excess
capacity, they are always besieged by excess demand for their facilities. Free
treatment will always attract demand; and the state governments can never have
enough money to meet all the demand. There is a case, therefore, for public
funding of private medical facilities. It may take the form of subsidies to
doctors, or sharing of capital costs; it should be conditional on the
government having free access to a certain proportion of the hospitals’
services.
Another crucial
element is capacity to build houses cheaply and quickly. Again, this is not the
speciality of public works departments. The Gujarat government was largely
absent as provider of shelter after the Kutch earthquake. But a great many
private and public agencies built houses there. One of the most remarkable ones
was the People’s Science Institute which, as a part of its resolve to apply
science to rural life, has been building earthquake-proof houses with local
materials in the Himalayas. Its houses took four days to build; and although
they were meant to be temporary, their occupants are perfectly happy to live in
them forever. Indian cities are strewn with slums for lack of such a
technology, but even more because local authorities do not allow slumdwellers
to build. If they were permitted to do so with a modicum of technology, we
would create enormous emergency building capacity which would be of use after
weather disasters.
The same is true
of decentralized power. By subsidizing centrally generated power, we have
ensured two things: that there is never enough power and what there is reaches
only a privileged minority; and that decentralized power technologies, based
for instance on solar power or biomass, can never be viable. One consequence of
removing power subsidies would be that there would be a level playing field for
competition amongst various power technologies; from amongst them would also
arise technologies that can applied quickly in emergencies.
Governments like
to think of solutions which require expenditure and which create work for their
bureaucracies; and that is liable to happen with natural disaster management as
well. But if a little imagination were used, a little freedom were allowed, a
little care went into finding solutions that can be adopted quickly by many, it
would be possible to create privately run disaster management mechanisms that
would help many more people quickly. The disaster whose consequences we are
suffering right now should make us rethink the government’s snail paced
programmes of disaster management, and look for nimbler alternatives.
