Disaster Mismanagement

Disaster (Mis)management

The recent thunderstorm has taken the country to a standstill. The sheer chaos made by dust storm, rain, hails and wind is colossal. May 2 and May 13 saw the biggest damage. These thunderstorms took about three hundred lives and injured thousands. Hundreds of vehicles got damaged and numerous trees got uprooted. Property worth millions has been damaged due to these natural calamities. This shows our poor state of preparedness.

As rightly said, ‘If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail’. Our country has no mechanism to fight with these disasters. We have surrendered before strong winds, and the administration remained mute spectator of the damage. Road traffic went berserk while telephone and electricity infrastructure remained paralyzed for days. Railway, metro and airport services remained halted for hours together keeping the country on its knees. This happens just because of strong winds, one can imagine the quantum of damage to be done by a hurricane or a cyclone, if it ever occurs in our country. It seems, a ‘Katrina’ or a ‘Harvey’ will wipe away the entire subcontinent. Another failure was the prediction of the storm. IMD turned into a mockery as its prediction seldom meets the result. States like Haryana declared two days holiday bringing the system to a standstill. Thousands of memes and jokes flooded the social media when the IMD’s prediction failed to meet its dates. It is our gross failure that even after seventy years of independence we have failed to erect a good system of weather forecast. For a vast country like ours, we need a robust weather prediction infrastructure. The worst part is that majority of India is under seismic zone, yet there is no preparedness. The geographers are of the view that a major earthquake is due which will jolt India from Kashmir to Arunachal. This will bring damage one could have never anticipated. We should ask ourselves this question, ‘Are we prepared for it?’. 

It is high time we should learn from countries like USA, Russia, Japan and China. Despite having atrocious climatic conditions, these countries perform exceptionally well on infrastructural grounds. They make sure that the supply of essential amenities to the affected areas should not stop. Even in heavy snowfall and torrential rainfall conditions, the electricity and communication services are least affected in these countries. Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’.

The Indians are amongst the least skilled in terms of disaster management. We lack even the basic first-aid training and emergency guidelines. Our households are neither equipped with emergency tools nor the infrastructure to sustain a higher order natural calamity. High speed winds and a couple of treefalls are enough to trigger panic amongst the Indian people. Disruption in electricity supply paralyze the entire post-accident operations. Every year, our country faces numerous natural calamities ranging from floods, droughts, dust storms, hailstorms, thunderstorms, cyclones, forest fires to earthquakes, yet we have failed to formulate a strong disaster management mechanism.  

The secret of crisis management is not good vs. bad, it’s preventing the bad from getting worse. The only solution to encounter natural disasters in a diverse country like ours is to train the people in disaster management. Institutions like Scouts and Guides, NDRF, NCC and Red Cross should come forward and play a crucial role in capacity building of the common people. Training should start at the school level. Disaster management exercises should be made compulsory at the school level and if needed it should be treated at par with the other scholastic grades. Every household should procure an emergency kit equipped with all the essential tools like torch, rope, knife, first-aid box etc. needed at the time of an emergency. Basic medical training camps should be held at block levels where exercises like administering CRP, dressing of wounds etc. should be taught to common folks. A team of such trained individuals should be constituted at every panchayat and block level. If needed, the Government of India should formulate a full fledged department or a ministry for disaster management which should be held responsible for providing men, material and services to all natural and manmade disasters. The recent example of an over-bridge pillar collapse in Varanasi is again an alarming call. It took the city administration two days just to lift the pillar from the sight of accident. There were no machines available and NDRF teams from Delhi have to rush in order to prevent the further damage. Such a sorry state of affairs nullifies all our efforts to be a developed nation.   

Preparedness is the only way we can combat a disaster. If we fail to prepare now, we will only regret the delay. These natural disasters are giving us strong signals of warning that we should stop playing havoc to the mother earth. It seems while the western world is learning something new with each disaster and equipping themselves with means to tackle the menace, we still prefer to close our eyes and blame the destiny.

-          Jagdeep S. More, Educationist