Though its military and National Disaster Response Force’s operations in Nepal indicate that this country now has the capacity to cope with elemental burst of nature’s fury, it can hardly afford to rest on its oars
By all yardsticks, India’s response to the terrible tragedy in Nepal is perhaps the most laudable achievement of the Modi Government. Spontaneous and humanitarian in character, it is bound to further consolidate the friendly ties between New Delhi and Kathmandu. It has also demonstrated spectacularly to the world India’s ability to respond to tragedies abroad on a scale that very few countries except the United States, Russia and China, can match. Not surprisingly its role has earned Washington, DC’s admiration though Western media, never too friendly toward this country, have either been silent or casually mentioned its name along with those of Pakistan, New Zealand and several other nations, thereby tending to suggest, through association, that their contributions were at par.
But let that be. It is more important to understand how India could play the admirable role it has. It is because of the experience and equipment it has accumulated, the disaster-specific administrative apparatus its has crafted, and the personnel it has trained, over decades of coping with domestic natural calamities. One can hardly overstate the importance of administrative capability. It is one thing for relief material to arrive in adequate numbers and quantities at a country’s capital and important urban centres and quite another to have these delivered to and distributed, particularly in far-flung areas. Nepal’s experience starkly underlined this. But then this was to be expected.
To be fair, no administration, however competent and omni-present could be expected to cope without glitches with a tragedy of the dimensions that struck Nepal. Also, Nepal’s administration has been paralysed for decades by the prolonged struggle to replace the monarchy by a republic, the civil war between the Maoists and Government forces, and the prolonged political confrontation during the last decade or so.
While Nepal’s Government has been doing its best, its efforts need to be urgently supplemented by assistance from friendly foreign Governments in the matter of taking accumulated relief material to distant affected areas and arranging for their distribution. This has been happening in some cases, but the process needs to be accelerated and an institutional structure, with tentacles spreading to far-flung villages, put in place at the earliest for coordinating national and international operations. This has to be done at the earliest because large-scale international administrative support would also be needed in the massive programme of relief and reconstruction that must be undertaken as soon as possible.
Thousands who have been maimed have to be rehabilitated. Hundreds of thousands of damaged or destroyed houses have to be repaired or rebuilt, and infrastructural facilities have to be completely reconstructed in all severely-affected areas. All this will require huge amounts of money and material besides administrative and specialised technical skills. India will have to continue playing the role of the principal provider because of its deep historical and cultural ties with Nepal as well as its geographical proximity.
Simultaneously, India has also to continue enhancing its own capacity for coping with gargantuan disasters. Though its military and National Disaster Response Force’s operations in Nepal strongly indicate that this country now has the capacity to cope with elemental burst of Nature’s fury, it can hardly afford to rest on its oars. It has suffered a long succession of natural calamities. Apart from the Tsunami that swept the parts of the Deccan Peninsula in 2004 and the flash floods that ravaged Kedarnath and other areas in Uttarakhand in 2013, the Odisha super-cyclone of 1999 and the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, left massive trails of death and destruction. Earthquakes in Uttarkashi in (1991), latur (1993), Jabalpur (1997) and Chamoli (1999) caused lesser, nevertheless considerable, havoc.
The seriousness of India’s intent to cope adequately with natural calamities was underlined when the National Disaster Management Authority was established in 2005 through the enactment of the National Disaster Management Act by Parliament. In 2006, the management of the National Cyclone Risk Management Project, which had been conceptualized earlier, was transferred to the NDMA. The National Disaster Response Force, which has been doing outstanding work in Nepal since the earthquake struck, was formed in 2009 as the NDMA’s operational arm.
The impact of setting up these three organisations, the fine tuning of the coordination between these, the India Meteorological Department, which accurately predicted the cyclone’s arrival and course, and working of the Central and State governments, was dramatically witnessed when cyclone Phailin hit Odisha in 2013. While the physical devastation was massive as in the case of Cyclone 05B (Paradip Cyclone) in 1999, the number of lives lost, 12, was in sharp contrast to the latter’s toll of around 10,000.
There are, however, limits to how much the Government can do. The impact of natural calamities is enormously aggravated by a number of human activities. These include construction of houses which do not pass safety norms or are located in places like flood plains of rivers or the location of dams and power plants in seismically sensitive zones. The point needs to be made because there have been a number of instances of dam bursts in India since Independence, the worst perhaps being the collapse of the Machhu-2 dam in Gujarat in 1979, which unleashed a flash flood that wiped out the Morvi dam and the nearby villages, causing fatalities estimated between 1,800 and 25,000 persons.
Machhu-2 was one of India’s smaller dams. One can imagine what might happen if the Tehri Dam, the tallest in the country, gives way. It is located in the Central Himalayan Seismic Gap, which is a major geological fault zone. Experts say that it has been designed to withstand earthquakes of the strength of up to 8.4 on the Richter scale. What happens if there is an even stronger earthquakeIJ Besides, there is the wider question of the environment.
Ruthless felling of trees in the catchment areas of rivers leads to soil erosion and increase in the silt load of rivers, which, deposited on river beds, raises the latter’s level, thus reducing their capacity and conducing to floods. Construction on the latter’s flood plains washes the buildings and their residents away during floods. In the last analysis, therefore, environment management and restriction of human activity is inseparable from disaster management. So is population control. It is population growth has led to activities that threaten the safety of both humans and the environment and aggravates the impact of natural calamities.