Late, Once Again

Enter the site and you are spoilt for choices on the management of natural calamities. Apart from the daily situation reports on the relief and rescue work being undertaken in the tsunami-stricken areas of South India and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, it is awash with information on brainstorming sessions, workshops and reports on disaster management and what have you.

But on December 26, when the killer waves struck, the government was yet to implement the National Disaster Management Plan based on the recommendations of the National Committee on Disaster Management. Set up in ’01 following the Gujarat earthquake, it was headed by the then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and had Sharad Pawar as vice-chairman. The Vajpayee government had shifted disaster management from the agriculture ministry, which now deals only with disasters arising out of drought, to the home ministry.

Three years later, when the nda demitted office, the plan was still on paper. The newly sworn-in UPA government began working on it but seven months on, it had just got to the final stages. Rues Union home secretary Dhirendra Singh: "We were in the final stages of putting together a National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA), a national emergency response force and formulating a central law which would provide a framework to manage disasters. A cabinet note was ready and we were just about to get cabinet approval when this happened."

So what did the plan envisage? Apart from NEMA to be headed by the Union home secretary, the other elements included the National Emergency Response Force (NERF) comprising eight battalions of specially trained personnel drawn from the CISF, ITBP and CRPF supported by dedicated air support and equipment in the four metros. There would have been an online inventory system; relief materials would be stocked in major cities. Alternative satellite links were also part of the plan.

Points out Singh: "Though the authority wasn’t ready, the home ministry’s disaster management unit was in place. We had the nucleus of the NERF ready and the CISF and ITBP units rushed to the Andaman and Nicobar were disaster-trained." Though the response of the Indian government to the tsunami compares favourably with other countries similarly affected, it was not enough.

The government’s usual mechanisms did get cracking within a few hours of the disaster. The MHA’s DM unit set up a control room. The cabinet secretary-headed crisis management group was in action. And a group of ministers to review the progress of the relief work was constituted. Since the civilian administration was not able to rise up to the task, a military-led integrated relief command took over the relief and rescue operations. Headed by Vice Admiral Raman Puri, they began Operation Sea Wave. The 17,500-strong force has also begun other operations in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Sumatra and the Maldives.

But there is a sour footnote—a minister and secretary of a key ministry involved in the relief work are not on talking terms. And at one of the gom meetings, Union minister for rural development Raghuvansh Prasad Singh took to task officials parroting the list of supplies sent out. He said: "The government of India is a big institution with enormous resources. Why are we behaving like a local NGO? The district authorities should specify what is required on the ground and those requirements must be met. There’s no point sending out material in dribs and drabs to create a sense that a lot is being done. " In a crisis of this magnitude, supply of governance rarely meets the demand.