The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Gujarat experience will help in reconstruction: NGOs

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 20, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Gujarat experience will help in reconstruction: NGOs

By R.K. Radhakrishnan

CHENNAI, JAN. 19. As the State Government firms up its policy on reconstruction, non-governmental organisations which worked in the aftermath of the Bhuj earthquake have requested it to consider the lessons learnt in Gujarat.

In a report, they said that after the Gujarat earthquake, the Government provided `assistance to reconstruct' directly to those whose houses were damaged. Cheque payments were made to each affected family.

Partnership

It also put in place a structured public-private partnership for NGO involvement in the permanent reconstruction and rehabilitation of the affected villages. Villages could decide whether they wanted an NGO to support them or not.

If they opted for NGO support, they would get only 50 per cent of their direct assistance from the Government. The NGO would meet the deficit with whatever amount that they wanted to put into the reconstruction of a house.

If the village chose not to go with an NGO, it would get 100 per cent assistance in three stages based on completion of the work.

"It must be noted here that 72 per cent of the villages [in Gujarat] chose to construct their houses without an NGO, and they were helped by an engineer from the Government placed in each village," said the NGO Coordination Council in Nagapattinam.

Wherever people were enabled to construct seismic-safe houses directly, with government assistance, they were most satisfied with the final structures and their habitat, said the NGOs.

Exaggerated claims

However, the huge scale of direct disbursements — even through banks — led to corruption, stemming from the exaggerated damage claimed by the affected. This should be curtailed with clear and one-time (not repeated) shelter damage assessment.

In the remaining 28 per cent of housing reconstruction, there were major differences in the way the NGOs worked.

"Four years after the disaster, an assessment shows that while donors and corporate houses worked directly with the village, the reconstruction programme was by and large without the community's participation or even a consensus on house designs. The houses were not aligned to people's ways of living, and used material and technologies that were not suited to the weather and living conditions of the communities. Today, in at least 11 such villages, houses lie unoccupied," the NGOs pointed out.

They said that in the first phase of policymaking after the Gujarat earthquake, there was confusion over whether the amount paid for permanent rehabilitation was `compensation' or `assistance' to reconstruct, they said.

While it was termed assistance, the norms of payment were that of compensation (a unit cost was paid for the amount of square feet lost, making the basic remuneration inequitable).

It was important to clearly state whether this was a compensation or assistance, and develop the norms equitably.

Categorising the NGOs or differentiating between those organisations which were donors and those which were grass roots developmental, or community mobilising groups, would be a definite improvement from what happened in Gujarat, the NGOs said.

In Gujarat, donor agencies, corporate houses, international aid agencies, etc., became the lead implementing organisations in villages as were grass roots developmental organisations. The quality of self-help and participative rehabilitation was often severely compromised, they said.

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