Muddling through has become the essence of India's crisis management strategies, and each new challenge or disaster produces new evidence of gross incompetence, failure and institutional collapse - all of which are forgotten soon enough, once the calamity of the day has lost its place in the headlines.
The final Indian death toll in the tsunami catastrophe is still to be computed, but whatever it may eventually be, the most appalling truth about this great tragedy is that thousands of these deaths could, in fact, have easily been averted if our responses had been sharper when the first intelligence on the developments in Indonesia and the potential threat to our own coastline began to circulate on the fringes of the monitoring and decision-making community, certainly well before 8:00 am on that fateful morning of December 26, 2004.
Indeed, at least a couple of cases of efficient initiatives along the coastline have been reported, where locals used simple internet resources to confirm the danger and evacuated coastal areas, saving entire villages from the deluge. This, indeed, is what can and should have happened across the entire coastline, within the hour after intelligence of the first shocks and the consequent cataclysmic waves in Indonesia had been received by the farthest meteorological monitoring station in India.
Unfortunately, as information hesitantly penetrated the high offices of the land to activate the nation's "crisis management" mechanisms it was already much too late. The Crisis Management Group (CMG), in fact, is reported to have finally met after 1:00 pm, some five hours after the first intelligence of the potential disaster had been received, and much after the tsunami had wrecked its havoc.
That our emergency responses are still predicated on a decision-making process centred in meetings around a conference table in this day and age is worse than absurd - it is criminal. Proactive decision-making mechanisms in such situations need to be activated in the minutes, not the hours, and there are a wide range of modern communication tools that can ensure that this happens. Whether it is the tsunami catastrophe or Kargil, a hijacking or a major terrorist attack, the truth is, adequate intelligence has often been available, but our antiquated processes of communication and decision-making, and the excessive emphasis on a top-heavy, relatively impenetrable,centralised and immensely bureaucratised mechanism of response, have made such forewarnings worthless, with enormous and avoidable costs inflicted in terms of innocent lives, resources and the national interest.
I had studied the operation of the CMG in the context of the hijack of IC 814 in December 1999 in some detail, and had documented the sheer incompetence of the Group's responses, even as I had spelt out the contours of a national crisis management structure and strategy. That was five years ago. The pattern of reactions in the wake of the tsunami disaster suggests that nothing has changed in the intervening years, despite much rhetoric on "proactivity" ingovernment and political circles. Indeed, there appears to have been little conscious effort withingovernment to examine and rationalise the operation of the CMG, and, indeed, of the country's widely dispersed emergency response infrastructure, in order to ensure that, next time around, at least where sufficient tactical intelligence and rational risk projections exist, our responses would comprehend at least a modicum of efficiency.
It is now imperative that the current regime initiate such an exercise. The intention, here, is not - as is the usual case with official inquiries - to fix blame on particular officials or institutions for past failures, but rather to evolve a paradigm of response that can prepare us, not just for the next natural disaster, but for the entire range of national emergencies that could potentially confront us. If we fail to correct the lapses of the past - and this has been our consistent failure - we will be condemned to repeat our errors at incremental costs to the nation. At some point of time, the processes of institutional attrition will carry us beyond the point of return or recovery, and the cumulative consequences, at that stage, could prove disastrous.
The most crucial element of any emergency response paradigm is the empowerment and immediate activation of the first responders - the local and district administration and agencies in the affected areas - and it is at this level that real capacities need to be enhanced or created. Nothing in this country can match the spread and potential effectiveness of the grassroots administration that we have. Indeed, there is possibly no other organisation of this magnitude or complexity in the world, and once it is galvanised, it can perform extraordinarily - as indeed it often does. Areas that experience repeated natural calamities - such as the annual flooding of the Brahmaputra Valley - have set up excellent systems of local response, with lakhs of displaced persons accommodated in camps for extended periods of time. Witness, in another context, the superb management of millions of people in the Kumbh melas.
Unfortunately, this administrative infrastructure has been systematically undermined over the decades by patterns ofcentralised management that have destroyed its effectiveness and forced officials to look constantly for guidance from thecentre, or from particular high-profile and charismatic leaders. In the present case, for instance,central teams have been dispatched by New Delhi to "assess the damage". But no centralteam can make a detailed and accurate assessment in a two-day "flying visit".
This, again, is a matter of technical evaluation at local levels, primarily by the revenue authorities who may be assisted by other local agencies. Unfortunately, whencentral agencies are seen as intervening, the out-ranked local authorities adopt a completely passive role. Worse, such attitudes persist even after thecentral nominees "lose interest" as they often do after the "dramatics of crisis management" are over and the media attention has waned. But the crisis and its larger consequences persist for months - sometimes for years - thereafter, when the real work of rehabilitation and reconstruction needs to be done. This is often neglected, as many of the high-profile political andnon-governmental actors simply abandon the theatre of the tragedy once it falls off the media platform.
This does not, however, mean that central agencies and the CMG have no legitimate role. Indeed, where disasters occur across wide geographical areas, some element of coordination across diverse agencies and State authorities is a necessity. What is important is that suchcentral intervention activate and support existing local responders at the earliest, making additional and emergency resources available to them. They should not, as is presently the case, become mechanisms for delay and waste.
Where national agencies monitor certain variables and parametres (for example, various natural disasters, weather patterns, intelligence relating to subversive and terrorist activities, etc.), it is also necessary that systems be set up for simultaneous warnings to alert both thecentral agencies and the first responders so that the present and cumbersome CMG mechanism can be circumvented. The CMG must, of course, also be alerted and activated, and but such activation must not be an obstacle but a facilitator, quickly backing up local resources and capacities with the massive support that can only be provided by the nationalgovernment.
Our current attention is focused on the tsunami, but the problem of crisis management extends beyond this catastrophe and is, in fact, not restricted to natural disasters alone. We are, in fact, equally poorly equipped to confront virtually any of a wide range of possible crises, including the dangers of catastrophic terrorist attack or other man-made disasters, particularly in our densely populated and expanding urban areas. The penalties that may be inflicted on us for our future unpreparedness may well be unbearable.
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K.P.S. Gill is Publisher, SAIR; President, Institute for Conflict Management.This article was first published in The Pioneer.
