Cover
Responding to calamity March 2011
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Far-flung benevolence: Youths gather around a statue of C N Annuradai, gathering donated clothes and gobbling donated bread, Seepudupettai.
Photo Credit: Dilip D'Souza
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The thing about great disasters that most fascinates me – inspires, repels, intrigues but always fascinates me – is the way people respond to them. There is tragedy, yes. But also, whether it is volunteers or victims, administrators or doctors – whoever they are, there are tales to tell, lessons to learn.
When talking about disasters, I often begin with two vignettes from tsunami-hit Tamil Nadu. The first, from a tiny village called Seepudupettai. Five days after the wave, I get there, walk around, speak to some of its still-stunned residents. Then I see an old woman. I see the old woman lift up a polyester dress. She holds it against herself, shakes her head and drops it back into the pile. No, it won’t fit. No, it’s not me. No, I don’t like polyester. No, I don’t wear dresses, I wear saris. No, not even a tsunami will make me want to wear someone else’s discard.
Which of these reasons is it? Your guess, my guess, it hardly matters. The dress lies on the ground.
The day before, the Tamil Nadu coast had been thrown into a frenzy by the sudden rumour of a second tsunami. In villages like Seepudupettai all along the coast, the people rose from whatever they were doing and ran, just as they had run five days earlier when the wall of water had snarled and lashed at them. Luckily, this second time it was just a rumour, and no wall came. But in a matter of minutes, the village emptied.
At exactly that moment, a forever unknown team of relief workers, presumably impervious to rumour, drove in a truck into Seepudupettai. They had a load of used clothes to hand out. But with the village strangely empty of people, there was nobody to take the handouts. So, they just dumped their whole load – their whole truckload of used clothes, collected from around the country – in the centre of town, at the base of a statue of that colossus of Tamil politics, C N Annadurai. (The nearby statue of that other colossus, M G Ramachandran, was not similarly favoured.)
When the second tsunami failed to make an appearance, the villagers came back to Seepudupettai. In the heart of the village, they found this pile of clothes, lying there like some peculiar miracle.
Coming upon the pile, I see several young men lounging in and on the clothes, stuffing their faces with slices of bread that some other relief team has distributed, hamming for my camera. I see kids diving headfirst into the clothes, jumping on them, treating the pile like a trampoline, laughing and playing. And I see the old woman, curious about a polyester dress some unknown lady in Bombay or Trichy or Jaunpur has swept from her wardrobe as her response to the distant monstrous wave. She’s curious, but she ultimately rejects the contribution of the remote donor. Tsunami or no tsunami, polyester will not do.
Opportunity knocks?
The second story comes from a village further south along the coast called Pushpavanam, where I visited a school about six months after the tsunami. Many schools in Tamil Nadu used to have thatched roofs, but by the time I arrived they were suddenly roofless – but not because of the tsunami. Half a year before the tsunami, a fire had broken out in a school in Kumbakonam, near the Kaveri River, while the midday meal was being cooked. The fire spread swiftly to several classrooms, helped along by their thatched roofs. Before it could be controlled. 83 kids were dead.
Responding to this tragedy, the Tamil Nadu government decreed that schools must no longer have thatched roofs. The upshot was that, pending the construction of new permanent roofs, the existing ones were dismantled and many schools were conducting classes in the open. But then came the tsunami, which damaged a number of schools in coastal villages. A disaster it certainly was, but it offered an opportunity to address wider needs as well.
One post-tsunami effort I know about, which has taken this view of their work, is called BITSunami, run by Chennai-based alumni of my alma mater, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS, thus the fortunate amalgamation in the name). Part of their work in Pushpavanam and some nearby villages focuses not just on rebuilding tsunami-damaged school buildings, but on putting concrete roofs on them as well. This strikes me as the best kind of response to a significant natural disaster: looking to the longer-term, beyond immediate needs. After all, these villages had problems that had to be addressed even without the tsunami, some of those being school needs. The great surge from the deep opened up an opportunity to solve those problems.
In grabbing that opportunity, this effort is also trying to address two other issues with schools in the area. They have to do with answering the question: How do you keep kids in school?
Answer number one: midday meals. Cooked, of course, under non-thatched roofs. This one school-provided meal – basic but nutritious rice and sambhar – is an important reason many kids in Tamil Nadu attend and stay in school.
Most Tamil Nadu village schools have a small structure where women sit to cook the midday meal on a woodstove. In the Pushpavanam school, I look inside one of these structures: its walls black with soot, smoke everywhere enough to make you cough, and two women emerge from the gloaming to tell me the menu for lunch. Along with repairing the school building and installing a new roof, BITSunami is also working on a new, better-ventilated room for cooking. And fuel for the fire will come from …
… Answer number two: toilets. Biogas, that is. Most schools in Tamil Nadu, like this one in Pushpavanam, do not have toilets. When they have to go, boys and girls alike walk out to the nearby fields. When puberty arrives, the girls will not go into the fields anymore – and therefore, they will not come to school anymore.
So, BITSunami is not just repairing school buildings, installing new roofs and building better kitchens. They are also building new toilet blocks for the schools. Here in Pushpavanam, there will be one block each for boys and girls and a septic tank in the middle. And their plan calls for biogas produced in the septic tank to be piped to the kitchen to be used as fuel for the mid-day meal.
The way we respond
People send old clothes that nobody in disaster-hit areas really want: I have lost track of the number of piles of discarded clothes I have seen. Relief teams often overestimate their enthusiasm; when they run out of it, they are more than happy to dump their loads in a deserted village and flee before someone sees them or gives suggestions. Other teams, however, settle in for the long term and look around for other tasks to take up. In Kutch after the quake of 2001, a team I was with for a week actually spent the next several months building a small dam so that the village would have drinking water available year-round.
In 1999, a ‘supercyclone’ slammed into Orissa. Fields were destroyed by both the storm and a flood of salty seawater it brought miles inland. At the centre of the cyclone was Erasama district, which was nearly flattened. In the week I spent there, I was profoundly moved by the spirit of people who responded to the crisis. From all over India, and indeed all over the world, they had come: to burn bodies (human and bovine), rebuild homes, take relief materials where it was needed, purify water, repair pipelines and build toilets. The selfless hard work was a tonic for anyone who has soured on such themes as nation-building, values or even humanity. No time for cynicism: you see all that in spades.
There are also the TV crews. The first I encounter in Orissa has come as part of a relief committee from a major steel plant, to document its work. As far as I can tell, this documentation goes like this: visit any official within the lens’ vision, stick a mike in his face, roll the camera and ask, ‘What do you think of the work of our relief committee?’ The official can hardly say anything but ‘Excellent!’ or ‘Wonderful!’. ‘Thank you very much, sir!’ says the mike-holder, before moving on to the next official.
Then they find me. Talking at dusk to some volunteers from a Delhi seminary, taking notes in my diary, I suddenly realise that a camera has appeared and a small crowd has gathered around us. Without waiting for me to finish with my note-taking, a man who had not seen or heard of me just seconds before sticks a mike in front of me. ‘We are here speaking to Mr Dilip, the famous and respected journalist from Bombay,’ he says to the camera, and I swear that is verbatim.
‘Mr Dilip, what do you think of the work of our relief committee?’
‘Excellent!’ I say. ‘Wonderful!’
‘Thank you very much, Mr Dilip!’ he says, and they move on.
The second TV crew I meet in Erasama – a genial producer and some taciturn cameramen – gives me a ride to a miraculously undamaged school building, where a number of villagers have taken temporary refuge. They have been given specific instructions to find an orphan and put him or her on air. Delhi TV news directors – what can you say? Anyway, after pursuing this goal without success through most of the day, they tell me they have finally heard of one young boy who lost his parents to the cyclone, and he is among these refugees.
The boy turns out to be a frail pre-teen with a distant expression on his face. The producer then talks to him, sits him on a low wall and sets up the camera. The attempts at an interview do not go well. I am no expert in the intricacies of television, but I could have told them when we first saw the poor kid: he will not be able to speak. His dazed look, his air of battered hopelessness, tell that story. When the camera rolls and a microphone is thrust in his face, he is only able to mumble a few sounds. The Delhi directors will have to wait at least another day, locate another bereaved child, to get their orphan story.
After the crew has given up, the producer and I sit with the boy. ‘Look’, we say, taking turns to talk softly, ‘now there’s no camera, no mike, nothing. We’re just here to be with you if you want to talk.’ We know nothing else to say, really. But with this, the kid opens up and speaks slowly, softly too, of all that he could not tell the camera. He lives only because he had left home earlier to visit a relative near this school. So when the cyclone came, he needed to run only a short distance to find shelter. Back at home, his four brothers, three sisters and his parents are all gone. This is a loss that is enormous, complete, sudden.
Somehow, I am glad he could not speak to the camera.
Charity for whom?
The way relief itself happens is too often depressing. There is no doubting the good intentions of most people, but you wish they would think a little bit more about how they contribute to relief work. For me, this hit home most clearly in Kutch in the aftermath of the massive Republic Day quake.
In the small village of Shikarpur, a relief team arrives with a truckload of clothes. They are immediately surrounded by a sea of reaching hands. The men stand in the truck and simply toss the old clothes into this pathetic maelstrom. Maybe they can think of no other way to distribute what they have brought, but it is still wincingly painful to watch. But that scene pales in comparison to what I come upon one evening in nearby Bhachau. Another truck drives down the highway, men sitting on top flinging off packets of Parle-G glucose biscuits, as quake victims race behind them, grasping. Homes reduced to rubble, friends and relatives killed by the calamity, and now made to fight over biscuits.
One team has driven a truck full of shankarpale, a popular fried snack, all the way from Nasik to Kutch, a distance of over 500 km. Apparently several women’s organisations in Nasik had gathered together to make the food, pack it into large cardboard cartons and then dispatch it. In Kutch, the team drove around for two days trying to give the stuff to quake victims, but found that nobody wanted it. (Presumably quake victims were more interested in substantial food rather than snacks). When they meet us, camped in the Kutchi village of Toraniya to work on relief measures, there is visible relief on their faces. They dump their load on us and get on the road back to Nasik. Why do people send this stuff?
Several men representing a Delhi traders’ association turn up in Toraniya, intent on feeding its villagers free meals for a week. While Toraniya was badly hit, it is not clear to me that its residents need, or want, free food. They have plenty in stock. Still, the traders get going with great gusto. They serve two savoury, piping-hot meals, lunch and dinner, that first day, and they run out of steam. The next morning, we wake to find they have lined up the villagers and are distributing their stock of vegetables, oil and vessels. Done with that, they get into their Toyota Qualis and leave for Delhi.
‘Kya karen, boss?’ one says to me just before leaving. ‘We have families back home too, and there’s two days travel ahead of us. We’re just tired.’ Maybe so, but what good they have really done with their excursion from Delhi, I cannot tell.
Exaggerated concern
Ladakh’s flash flood of August 2010 was not a disaster on the epic scale of Orissa, Kutch or Tamil Nadu – or what was taking place at the same time in Pakistan. Nevertheless, it killed about 150 people and caused some frightening destruction in and around Leh. In my time there, I find that the flood had got a lot of residents thinking, of all things, about tourism.
Tourism is the backbone of Ladakh’s economy. It is how everyone from taxi drivers to guesthouse owners to the old women who sell apricots and cauliflowers in Leh’s market area make a living. But this is a living that must be made in the five or six warmer months of the year, between May and October. Ladakh’s severe winter months see hardly any tourists at all.
The flood came down in early August, almost exactly at the halfway point of the tourist season. Frightened, many tourists who had planned to visit Ladakh in the months ahead cancelled their trips. Many who were already in Ladakh decided immediately to leave for home. Squeezed by a flood, the tourist economy slowed to a trickle. Not that this is obvious to someone like me, in Ladakh for the first time. To my eyes, there are plenty of tourists, and particularly a ridiculous amount of traffic for Leh’s narrow streets. Yet all the old Leh hands pooh-pooh this. Had there been no flood, they say, there would have been far greater crowds.
How much greater? I get a hint of an answer over lunch at an elegant terrace eatery, Bon Appetit. Stanzin Lamo is one of its two proprietors, and because there is nobody else at lunch, she is able to sit with me for a leisurely chat over chicken momos. She points out that her restaurant can handle 92 people, and yet I am the only one there. On a good night before the flash flood, as many as 150 would have come in to Bon Appetit, crowding the parapet as they wait for a table. These days, 10 for dinner marks a good night. In that sudden drop is a sign of what the flood has wrought.
But here is the question many Ladakhis ask: Flood notwithstanding, did it really have to turn out like this?
Consider: Flood damage was severe, no doubt, but in a few specific areas – Choglamsar, one part of Leh, and several smaller villages. The rest of Ladakh was more or less untouched. This contrast is almost surreal, and it is especially evident in Leh. The whole lower section of town, all the way to the airport, looked like a war zone after the flood. The water poured out of the hills and slammed into that part of town, destroying structures on either side of the road. But walk past and above that section, and it is as if nothing had happened. Upper Leh is completely intact, completely normal.
Leh residents ask me, then: Why did journalists report that Leh had been ‘flattened’, that there was no drinking water available, that there were epidemics breaking out? ‘The truth was bad enough,’ says Stanzin. ‘So why exaggerate it?’
Whatever the reason, the result is the steep fall in tourism. Several Western countries issued travel advisories cautioning citizens not to travel to Leh. As Chewang Montup, the proprietor of a respected adventure-travel company, tells me, travel agencies in those countries will likely excise Ladakh from their 2011 brochures. So in the 2011 tourist season, the arrival numbers will fall again, carrying forward the impact of the flood.
This is like a looming second disaster. Or perhaps you can imagine that the second disaster has already visited Ladakh, in the shape of the huge tourism slowdown in 2010. Whatever it is, plenty of Ladakhis blame the media for it. ‘The media played a negative role,’ says Montup. ‘Because really, most of Ladakh is not affected.’
And yet, a journalist who visits Ladakh to report on the flood is hardly likely to focus on places that were ‘not affected’. The immediate story is about destruction and death, and at least in the first few days that must dominate any coverage of a disaster. Perhaps the coverage will end up exaggerating the scale of the disaster for people outside Ladakh. But maybe that is just the way it goes.
Hazard and disaster
A World Bank report from November 2010 calculates that natural disasters killed over three million people between 1970 and 2008. In particular, the report describes the case of Bangladesh. During the 1970s and 1980s, floods and cyclones there caused tens of thousands of deaths. The famed November 1970 cyclone alone, for example, killed 300,000 people. But in May 1997, a cyclone killed just 111. In 2007, Cyclone Sidr killed about 4000 – despite being significantly stronger than the one that hit in 1970. A great improvement over the calamities of a generation earlier. What had happened?
The answer is simple. Government and civil society eventually reacted to multiple earlier disasters by chalking out plans for mitigating the calamity. Cyclone shelters were built. Early-warning systems – radio broadcasts, coloured flags – were implemented. When Sidr threatened, says the report, ‘Authorities tracked its path and growing strength and had time to prepare a well rehearsed response: they issued warnings and activated 44,000 volunteers who helped evacuate roughly 3 million from their homes, and accommodate 1.5 million in shelters. Few were surprised and unprotected when Sidr hit.’
There is much remaining to be done in Bangladesh, of course. But the point is that this is the kind of response great calamities most demand from all of us: that we think hard about how to reduce the damage the next time. We will always have natural hazards, but there are ways to minimise their disastrous impact.
From the World Bank report, this thought-provoking sentence: ‘Disasters can be prevented even if hazards cannot.’
--Dilip D’Souza is a writer and journalist in Bombay.
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