National

A Year Later...

Lane of death: A headless idol in Anjar marks the spot where a whole R-Day convoy of schoolchildren went under

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A Year Later...
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When the joy of life is replaced by the grief of survival, you either turn frostily stoic or gamely cynical. So it is with Dhansukhlal Dholakia, Bhuj's sprightly cynic. Sitting on the steep stone steps of the old city ramparts where wiry peddlers and dust-caked whores sell their heroin and bodies by night and avuncular retirees congregate for their talkathons in the mornings, the 71-year-old primary school teacher wonders how so many things could have gone wrong with his life. His wife, Yogeshwari, died nine years ago, felled by cancer. Father and son Hiten, a bright young physics major, moved into their own home which Dholakia bought in the congested old city for Rs 3.5 lakh after cleaning out his savings. Hiten made enough money giving tuitions to keep the home fires burning; and the convivial Dhansukhlal pottered around town, the inveterate retiree socialiser. This was till their five-storey apartment building came crumbling down during the killer-quake on Republic Day and drowned Hiten in rubble. Dhansukhlal rushed back from a social chore, and took out his son from the debris 40 hours later "alive, hearty and fine". Then Hiten complained of an abdominal pain. Father flew son down to Ahmedabad the very same day, and put him in a hospital. Nine days later, 25-year-old Hiten died of renal failure. In under a decade Dhansukhlal had lost his family and home.

Dhansukhlal still doesn't have his own home to go back to, but he got a lakh of rupees for his son's life. He gave away the money to a local temple. He also got an insulting Rs 500 cash 'dole' three weeks after the quake. As if these insults were not enough for a perfectly honourable retiree-citizen, the government still makes him fill lots of forms these days, nearly a year after the quake—"I have filled three already." Dhansukhlal's quirky sense of black humour is growing stronger by the day. "I think," he says, "the money will keep coming in dribs and drabs even after I die. Who says the state doesn't work? Not I!" These days he's moved in with daughter Meenakshee and his two grandsons Nikunj and Kunjan in town. "I'd go mad if they weren't around. Sweet life is gone."

The sun is peeping out feebly to usher in another new day in this frayed 450-year-old town where collective hopelessness and rage has turned into tired ire. It's left to Karsan Patel, a dapper middle-aged Londoner who visits his old mother in town every year, to go ballistic on the retirees' step. "Forms, forms and forms, that's what the government knows about. It is too damn slow. Look around and see the mess. Bullshit!" he spits out in anger, before disappearing into the morning mist.

The familiar Angry People vs the Apathetic State burlesque is playing out again—this time in Gujarat, nearly a year after the 7.9-strong earthquake killed some 20,000 and injured another 50,000 people. But in Kutch, Ground Zero of the angry earth, which bore the brunt of the damage, people are not waiting for the state to pick up the pieces. The Kafkaesque routine of filling up forms, cajoling survey inspectors to write down "good" compensation money for destroyed or damaged homes, and waiting endlessly for the government to tell you whether you can build anew where you lived is sapping the strength out of its distressed people. By the way, a total of 12,221 people, to be precise, perished and 1.45 lakh homes bit the dust in Kutch alone. The majority of loss of life and property again were in the four towns of Bhuj, Bhachau, Anjar and Rapar.

Not that there's a paucity of plans. There have to be ways to spend some Rs 3,000 crore which the government has pledged to put into Kutch's rise from the detritus. The place where Dhansukhlal's apartment block stood in Bhuj's old city, for example, is awaiting a new development plan—planners are working on ways to redesign and partly relay the catastrophically-congested place: build new roads on its periphery, widen existing ones, make builders adhere to strict building laws. "Each family will not be able to get a new home when we re-develop the old city," says collector H.N. Chibber. The ones who don't get their homes back there will be given the option to move to one of three new sites—"just identified" by the way—outside the city where the government is promising them bigger plots. People will be allowed to rebuild in some places in the old town left untouched by the new development. Fixing the price of the dead was the easy part and monies have been largely doled out: a lakh of rupees for the adults; children come cheaper in death at Rs 60,000. So why are people complaining? "Eternal cribbers," says a harried mandarin. "They don't even want to relocate."

But relocation is, indeed, a touchy issue, exacerbated by ignorant, fatalistic people and a pushy, non-transparent government. Out of the 984 villages in Kutch that were hit by the quake, only eight are being relocated. For one, people in agrarian rural India steadfastly refuse to leave roots and, naturally, get dislocated from their land. The government and the NGOs, at their best, largely fail to convince people that sometimes relocation can mean a better future—if planned properly. But the best of relocation efforts can begin to look awfully awry. Look at new Dudhai, a village set up by Rashtriya Swabhiman, an NGO run by a BJP functionary, some two km away from the original village, totally wrecked by the quake. The new village was sold as a home away from home with bus and gas stations, old age homes, libraries, wide roads with signs, playgrounds, high schools, all spread over 150-acres alongside a highway. The price residents paid for a new beginning: Rs 4,500. But today, the 450 surviving families live in this sprawling village which has solar lights on streets and stirring road names, but no proper floors and little drinking water and a surly gatekeeper marking entry. "Some homes have already developed cracks," says Abdul Razak, a cycle shop owner-resident. "The gatekeeper closes the gates at 10 in the night. The NGO began farming the excess land on its own." There is widespread suspicion all around. "The people don't trust the governments and NGOs about their intentions," says Jaisheel Sitapara, a mechanical engineer, standing in the flattened rubble of Anjar where 5,000 houses stood before the quake. "There's not enough transparency."

So there are whispers of NGOs and religious organisations grabbing land under the guise of setting up facilities for quake survivors, doubts about whether the newly-developed towns and villages will come up at all in time, and misgivings among neighbours over wrangling fatter compensation deals from surveyors after greasing their palms. If that was not enough, Jan Sangharsh Mancha, an Ahmedabad-based NGO, has gone to courts charging the government—and the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD)—of fudging the quake's epicentre location: the official version is the epicentre was at Lodai, near Bhuj, at an intensity of 6.9 on the Richter scale. Now the NGO says that the epicentre was at Naerbandhi, 20 km from Bhachau and the quake registered a Richter scale reading of 7.8 to 7.9. But why would the government fudge epicentres and Richter scales? "To ensure more relief reached Bhuj, so it could be looted there. To ensure Bhachau didn't come into the focus soon after," says Shyam Sundar, an Anjar-based doctor, who heads a group of NGOs.

In this atmosphere of distrust, age-old neighbourly ties are souring. In the devastated historic town of Morbi, Sanjay Dashikanth, a high school teacher, who lost his Rs 1.5-lakh home but managed to save his family, says the surveyor wrote out a paltry Rs 15,000 compensation to rebuild his house. So he drowned himself in debt again, borrowing Rs 2.5 lakh from his school group provident fund, and rebuilt his new, smaller home. But he wonders aloud how his good neighbour, Satish Pai, who runs a tailor's shop, got a survey-endorsed compensation of Rs 1.4 lakh to rebuild his home. "I demanded a fresh survey of the damage, but nobody came," says Dashikanth. There are whispers about the orphans too. At the sun-washed Arya Samaj building in chaotic Gandhidham, 23 orphans are taking shelter, going to school, learning the scriptures and eating good food. But sheltering orphans gives good dividends, whisper town people. The Samaj has now got a sprawling two-acre land in the neighbourhood to build a "modern" orphanage and widows' home.

Life goes on in Gujarat's squalid rubbletowns. Teachers raise money to repair and restart schools, people start businesses in tawny donated containers and live in tents, galvanised iron shacks and commodious concrete tenements depending on class, caste and community affiliations. Survivors desperately get on with life: Iswar Lal Ranchore, a rare survivor from Bhachau, just rebuilds his cubbyhole tailoring shack, now standing out surreally in a rubble-filled landscape. "Since I survived, I had to get on with life. So I spent Rs 5,000 and rebuilt the shop," he says. Since not many town people are alive any longer, he gets business worth Rs 40 a day, down by a fifth when Bhachau was a raucous, busy place. Most days, in the rubbletowns, people from afar are seeking places that have no names, no faces, no numbers any more. In this stygian landscape, unkind nature, a typically venal government and social work carpetbaggers have ensured the debasement of the citizen—again.

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