A long time ago, in some magazine, I read about an old woman accosting an airline pilot after reaching the destination, and saying “ That young man, was the worst touchdown I have been in ever”, to which the pilot replied amicably, “ There are only two kinds of touchdowns – safe and unsafe. This was a safe one.” That is my philosophy too.
So when a disaster of the scale of this Uttarakhand Deluge takes place, I like to keep my eyes on the basics – how many people were there, how many were saved. Not given ample food, not given five star treatments, just saved. So when I read about 100,000 people being brought to safety out of an estimated 120,000 with about 850 bodies found (as of 26 June 2013), I think it’s a stupendous job.
The Media and Social Media apparently have higher yet undisclosed standards by which measure the whole disaster management is a disaster and everybody is being relentlessly pounded (except the defence and paramilitary). I think by denigrating everybody else’s efforts we are not only demoralising them, we are setting ourselves up for a more cynical administration which by no means is what we need.
From media reports, from my experience of running projects, from seeing what happens in the government, whether the defence or civilian, this is the sequence of events that I would say happened.
- Information on impending bad climate was received and the same disseminated. With tourist population outstripping the local, possibly more stress was laid on informing them and getting them out of danger. There was a report in the Hindu on 25th June, 2013 that did cover how one family took the warnings seriously and made it to safety well in time, but saw most others unwilling to abandon their trip. People have died of such obstinacy on the Mount Everest when they see their window of opportunity closing in the end of the season. But those are people who are willing to die in their attempt at immortal fame. The ordinary tourists here were more likely penny pinching and irresponsible with their own and other lives. Short of shooting in the air to frighten them into buses, I don’t see what the government could have done more than providing the information. Would be happy to learn on methods used in other places.
- The collapse of the glacier dome was obviously a surprise. But should any event in the young mountain range of Himalayas be considered shocking? Ill-timed definitely. But the possibility always existed. These were places where only the adventurous with a suicidal bent went a hundred years ago. Only the fit went decades ago. The return of pilgrims from such places used to be celebrated as almost a rebirth. Just because today we can drive up to a temple and stroll in to pray, it never actually meant nature had been tamed. It may have even meant that it led to the quicker decline of the glacier dome. Nevertheless, there does not seem to a report, at least none has been quoted thus far on the impending collapse of the dome ‘this’ season, so that would have been a surprise.
- Having collapsed, the route that the river would take, I don’t think there is a reliable model on. That the town of Kedarnath was pretty much built between all previous forays of the river, is now apparent as the satellite images in Down To Earth have shown. That is bad planning going back decades. The incumbent government may well have been party to it, but they were not alone. The lure of the lucre had possibly bit the entire state. They did have to make money for a few months a year and maximize it as much as they could. But making a living is not mutually exclusive from building a sustainable business; just more expensive.
- The local administration (and in current times, anybody with a cellphone and the number of a media person) informs the next level office while starting to do what it can. In a case like this, the local office is also likely to have got affected making their ability to take immediate measures compromised. The relief would have to come from elsewhere. From what I know, when a state needs Army intervention, it sends a request to the Center. From what one can see, the request and the approval seems to have been done with little red tape or delays. Within hours of the deluge, the Army and the Paramilitary seem to have been at work as also the State and National Disaster Management teams.
- The individual contributions are not known but I believe it is extremely ungenerous to assume that only the Military wings were efficient and others were twiddling thumbs. That we don’t have Process and Procedure manuals to handle emergency situations is well known. Whether it is an aircraft hijacking, an industrial fire, a riot or a medical emergency, people are still thinking on their feet and the outcomes are more often than not, just chance rather than by design. That is obviously true here too.
But what we do understand from the various media reports is
- There is a core team liaising with all parties – the three defence forces, each paramilitary force, the railways, the states, the telecom dept, the public works departments, the food departments, the weather department and so on. The composition of this team is not known but more likely than not will have people from all the above and the state government
- The affected area has been distributed among the rescue teams so that there is no duplication of work. Information from each of these teams is tabulated as is the information coming from states on the names and numbers of tourists likely to be caught there.
- The priorities for each team is obviously defined and the relevant party put on the job. Decisions like which telecom tower to restore first and which road to be repaired first, is a decision that is unlikely to be taken unilaterally by any one division at work. The priorities decided may be different than what others believe is the correct way of going about it, but that is neither here nor there. But there is some method more than madness happening, else how would 90000 people be brought to safety with a week? No country can be that lucky to be able to do that.
- On the first day, there were reports of food being dropped randomly at times into the teeming river. In a scenario of lack of adequate information, someone may have decided something is better than nothing. Once the real rescue operations began, at least such reports ended.
- The ability to source and distribute food amongst people who are spread over a vast area is likely to be everybody’s worst nightmare. But I have no seen any report on how the food packets were made. While it may be tempting to say it was all done by the Army et al, let’s be realistic. There has to have been civilian contributions – railways, government canteens, hotels, restaurants, individuals. There has to have been someone co-ordinating it. If the rations in the five important places enroute have been destroyed as also that carried by the tourists themselves, why do we expect that there should be sufficient food available immediately for all irrespective of where they are? I have read reports saying for a lakh people only 50000 packets were distributed. I see no inquiry into how the 50000 packets were put together. May be even that was a stretch with hundreds of people working round the clock.
- Camps have been set up. Some are obviously being done by social groups and civil society. But it is to me not believable that only they are doing it. Chances are that if in one place someone is doing a good job, someone else is doing it elsewhere. Someone is monitoring, where what is happening. If someone has the data on number of camps and people who have been through each camp one would get an idea of what is happening. But as it stands, it is just hearsay.
- If all the camps are bunched together or some with no real amenities, that could be a problem. But the reports I read seem to say that if civil society has to set up a camp it is a failure of the state. That is reminiscent of the patriarchal society where if a daughter worked to feed a family, it was a weakness of the patriarch. From all accounts, people are getting enough to survive even in the upper reaches, as long as they have been found by the rescuers. If people in India are volunteering in large numbers, that is something to be proud of. But it does not automatically translated into only they were helping.
- In such a scenario, I don’t even understand what is the concept of “best run camp” that I see in the newspapers. Can a camp just below the danger zone be as equipped as the one in Dehradun? Again I go back to saying, if the camps are helping people get back to normal, that is good enough. Food, medicines, bed, the bare minimum required. Maybe my standards are low. But then I don’t know what are the real standards yet. I am just told this is not good enough.
- The Railways has been arranging special trains from Dehradun. That is hardly happening by itself. The state government, individual states, the center and the railways have to be involved. Notwithstanding grandstanding by others, the fact is that of the 90000 rescued most have been brought to safety and their way home being arranged. The rate at which people reached Dehradun or Haridwar probably was decided more by where and when they were found, what other emergencies there existed in that area at that point in time, and so on. Not necessarily all because the government decided to abandon them. A report this morning has some people complaining that after they were brought to safety, people below 50 were asked to start walking the next 75 km. Given the resources and the fact that they went to the voluntarily, I find such carping extremely selfish and irresponsible. But then aren’t most of us that?
- There are reports of doctors being sent in large numbers from different parts of the country, mostly the north to take care of the people rescued. Someone is co-ordinating it. Army could not be doing so alone. There are medicines being rushed in. All this has to have a component of the state government, state health department, the disaster management teams alongwith the corresponding Central departments. There have been reports of a distinct lack of interest from the corporates in supplying medicines and other supplies. So as much as the civil society has camps, the health needs are being taken care of by the government, by and large. I am not sure if the breathing lessons from Ashrams that side are helping, because media has distinctly not covered any statements from the well known proponents in that part of the world.
The political class has I think behaved disgracefully by and large. I have seen more negative comments than positive. There are people carping at each other, intra party and inter-party. The bosses have had the need to say, “things can be better” – not exactly what they changed for the better. The Opposition which on a normal day, has issues with everything that the government does, is not my reliable source of information. I prefer facts, most of which I have from the Hindu, mainly because it is the only paper focusing on numbers. They may not be accurate but at least they are a good indication of what is happening.
Many states did their job silently and efficiently by all accounts. The Hindu on the 21st, said there was a team from West Bengal collating names and arranging for their departure for the past 4 days and on the 22nd June, said 5000 Bengalis had reached home (not Dehradun). Similar teams were reported from Maharashtra, MP, Tamilnadu and so on. Someone on Facebook said they did not like the idea of states helping only their citizens in this Republic. To me that showed a distinct lack of imagination or knowledge of how things may proceed in such cases. In fact I too learned only through the news reports on how each state set up phones where people could call and give information on who from their family was in those regions, which was then used to track how many people were out there in need of rescue and how many had been rescued and now needed means to reach home and how many did reach home. When somebody is said to have “rescued” 15000 people in a day, unfortunately most educated people did no arithmetic to see if it was possible. It just sounded impossible from the word go. There were fans who believed and defended until suddenly it became a media conspiracy. I think that whole episode again took the eyes away from the ball- people in the upper reaches who are yet to be rescued.
I do not doubt that these efforts cannot be improved. There was possibly a lot of confusion in the beginning. But the point is, that the regrouping was quick, whoever the catalyst in doing so. But all evidence points to this indeed being a stupendous effort with more success than failure. I just don’t like the ungenerous behavior of the citizens, their willingness to believe all good of some and all bad of some. I am one of those minority that believes that, in the long term terror can be eliminated but 100% tracking and stopping terror events is impossible for any government; a government should work to avoid rioting, because irrespective of who is in power, stopping one is not easy. It is the same here. Minimising loss of life and property in a natural disaster needs a long term strategy, a short term need for rescue cannot be clubbed with that. It has to be assessed by itself. The party in power is not important, the work they do when needed is.
There is still work to be done so it might be early to discuss this, but one elephant in the room for me, is are Indians good citizens? Do we care what happens to others? Do we know what to do in a disaster situation? Are we trained in it by society, school or family? ( after the Mumbai Terror Attack I truly believed that the police should develop such a manual and make it available. But my friends in the police I don’t think deemed it there job or that it was necessary. One of my biggest beliefs is that in any disaster situation, there is safety in numbers and that you should try and get together with others. Some of the deaths in Mumbai happened to people alone in their rooms. But how will you defend yourself if you are alone? Sure enough, Here too, one of the rescue operations guy said stragglers all over the place was a problem for delivering food and finding them for rescue). Most large buildings in india rarely conduct fire drills. I think even that training may be helpful in such scenarios. People in India need to learn how to become a cohesive group automatically when needed.
And the final question is do we care what happens to the environment? If travelling in hordes is damaging the environment, should there be regulation of the same? Is it the unfettered right of the physically unfit (irrespective of whether by illness or age or sheer lack of exercise) to be able to travel everywhere to the detriment of the long term sustainability of a ecological system. Is it the governments duty to make it possible for all to travel there? The impact of unregulated tourism has been felt in Amarnath where the stalagmite no longer can sustain itself through the entire season, in Antarctica where large glaciers have broken up, in Australia where the Coral Reefs are dying, to just name a few. The level of awareness is pretty low. I just recently read someone saying that helicopters are now quite efficient and not very polluting. As much as I feel that such places must be made elitist – either pay tons of money or have a great level of physical fitness to go there, it made me laugh to think there is someone who believes that helicopters are eco-friendly. Google tells me that the most efficient helicopter is less efficient than a airplane in fuel economy. Something that I thought most people would know instinctively. If they don’t, we need to train them to think ecologically.
