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A year after
IT IS A year today since the terrible Kutch earthquake took 30,000 lives and caused a loss of some Rs. 13,000 crores through destruction of private and public economic assets. As it always is in India, the experience of reconstruction and rehabilitation over the past year has been mixed. The resilience of the Indian people, strengthened in this case by the innate spirit of the Gujaratis, has meant that lives in Kutch are being rebuilt and the daily struggle has resumed its normal routine. At the other end, the Government machinery — notwithstanding the high-profile campaign the State Government has unleashed to mark the anniversary — never did shake off the woefully inadequate response to the disaster that it registered in the immediate aftermath of the quake. The record of the social non-governmental organisations has not been uniform. Many came forward with the promise of funds and assistance; but on the ground commendable work has been accompanied by haphazard and even insensitive programmes. And of the many institutions and corporations which promised to "adopt" devastated towns and villages for reconstruction, few have followed those headline-grabbing promises with concrete action.
The Government of Gujarat has claimed that the response to the Gujarat disaster has been much faster than than in the Latur quake of 1993. That the public listing of beneficiaries of Government relief has been completed more quickly, many more houses have been constructed for the affected and that Government assistance has in general been more forthcoming. These are what the official statistics say and the stupor of the Keshubhai Patel Government may have been replaced by a more visible Narendra Modi Ministry in the State. But on the ground, in the worst affected towns of Bhuj, Anjar and Bachau as well as in remote villages, the public complaint is that even relief was never provided satisfactorily. Housing construction has been slow in many areas and there are reports of people living in makeshift shelters a year after the earth swallowed their homes. In a few places, while reconstruction has progressed, there has been the very disturbing development of the process being used for a certain kind of social engineering — relocation of Dalit and Muslim communities to the fringes of towns and villages while the traditional upper castes have strengthened their presence in the centre of habitations. Moreover, while whatever little has been done has been in the area of physical reconstruction and, by some NGOs, in rehabilitating people who have suffered serious physical injuries, what has been almost completely absent is rehabilitation that seeks to heal the psychological scars of the orphans, parents who have seen their children die and spouses who have lost their partners. The Government is not good at providing such healing, but it can supplement and finance NGO efforts in this direction.
To be fair to the Government of Gujarat, reconstruction and rehabilitation on the scale required after the Kutch earthquake could not be completed in a year. But much more could and certainly needed to be done. The test now will be if the State Government, aided by the Centre, NGOs and the larger community, can do a better job in the years ahead so that the Gujarat programme does indeed become a model for at least long-term reconstruction. The response to the Kutch quake demonstrated that Government at all levels — Centre, State and local — was totally ill-equipped to handle a disaster on that scale. The fallout then was a flurry of activity and the formation of panels and committees at the Centre — the National Committee on Disaster Management was only one — to make suggestions for the establishment of a quick response mechanism for rescue and relief. As the plight of the people of Kutch receded from the headlines, so have the concerns about India's tardy disaster management process.
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