Get professionals to deal with disasters
Two weeks on, doubts are rightly being cast on all relevant aspects of forecasting and effective action in respect of the massive disaster that recently struck Uttarakhand. All that can be said with certainty is that we were caught unawares by the scale of the disaster, and that we did not have timely and specific information that could gain traction with the government agencies charged with dealing with such emergencies. Such is the state of affairs that the Speaker of the Uttarakhand Assembly has publicly expressed concern that as many as 10,000 people may have been killed in the calamitous events that followed the June 16 cloudburst while chief minister Vijay Bahuguna discounts such an estimate from a senior politician of his own Congress Party, but does not offer any credible estimate of his own.
Since it is not clear how many actually perished, it is also not clear how many were taken to safety. In such situations, ordinary people can hardly be faulted for thinking that government claims are fundamentally flawed, if not false, and that the scale of loss — in people’s lives and materials — is just too horrific to contemplate. In these circumstances, it is evident that the `1,000-crore Central assistance offered by the Prime Minister will need substantial scaling up.
The Indian armed forces, and certain other uniformed services, played a heroic and stellar role in the past fortnight in rescue and evacuation work, but several other official agencies were found out. What’s become apparent is that the civilian administration in the state has been less than responsive, with new details suggesting the chief secretary showed scant regard for reports of the state disaster management agency.
It is best to face facts — that the National Disaster Management Authority and its state affiliates need to go back to the drawing board. They also need to be revamped. Their inadequacies have been exposed with almost every emergency they have tackled, the Uttarakhand being the most glaring example.
We need professionals with experience drawn from different fields at the top, not politicians. Besides, the organisation needs appropriate funding and auditing. The PM should not be the chairperson of such a body. He doesn’t have the time. The interface between the NDMA and the civilian administration also needs to be better structured and better drilled. This is true of all states, not just Uttarakhand.
To make matters worse, Congress and BJP politicians in particular made themselves a laughing stock by the way they conducted themselves. The Narendra Modi episode and the Congress’ counter-charge were pathetic examples of one-upmanship, and sapped public morale. On the whole, public institutions failed and blamed one another — a clear sign of poor governance and underdevelopment.
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