Yet the socio-economic paradigm that is needed to make significant progress in reducing and containing vulnerability in large, populous Asiatic societies doesn’t seem to be onboard as yet.
Let us get some “fashionable” contrafactuals out of the way. It is true that it is mainly the poor who suffer from food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition. But not all poor people are equallyvulnerable to disaster, and it is not always mostly the poorest who are exposed to the greatest risks. There are many other factors that determine vulnerability. These include the risk of exposure to crises, stress and shocks. There is also the population that is subjected to risk by civil breakdowns and violence on a communal scale. Poor people will suffer since access to resources will be limited, but in crises created by nature or man, people who are well off will also be vulnerable. I have seen communities with purchasing power deprived for days and weeks of access to the basic necessities of life. In populous Asiatic societies, we are talking of a social and not sectional disaster.
Sometimes our rules, particularly of protection (police) and economic (finance and credit) solace, don’t take this into account. It would be useful to develop newer protocols with fresh mindsets.
Paradoxically, fast economic development without corresponding development in civil society organisations can lead to greater vulner- ability.To begin with, the wealth involved is unimaginably larger as compared to the last occasion in a society growing at Chinese, Indian or East Asian growth rates. Iwas caught in the century’s worst Saurashtra cyclone in 1982 and the state asked me to chair the Kutch Earthquake Relief Advisory Committee 20 years later. When you grow the way Gujarat does, you almost double wealth every eight years or so. I am a trained econometrician, but I could see that past memory banks and statistics are irrelevant. We quickly worked out that the state had lost a significant part of its housing stock which is an inheritance of centuries and the re- placement value of which is very high. The numbers of houses destroyed in western China tell a similar story.
I went to Kunming a few years ago, chairing a Rajiv Gandhi Foundation delegation. Incidentally, since nature does not respect political boundaries, Kunming is probably not more than an hour and a half by plane from Arunachal Pradesh, where some of the largest hydel projects in the world are on the drawing board. I empathise with Mani Shankar Aiyar and Jairam Ramesh in their exhortations to open up the Northeast, with its historical communication links with the Mekong and other regions, rather than enclose them within “Inner Lines”. A Malayalee priest well-versed in the martial arts of Kerala formulated Kung Fu and went to China from the Northeast rather than from Ladakh, from where the Avalokiteshwara proceeded. Chinese legends attribute magical qualities to him. The Northeast can be the strong arm of India to the East just as Kashmir is with regard to Central Asia.
Earthquakes are natural, but as you grow fast, damage depends on land use, the nature of development and the ability of social and governance institutions to cope. Conceptually, disaster management in this perspective is at a rudimentary level in India, and I suspect in the rest of Asia as well, and experience-sharing has to be societal rather than only technical and off icial.
Incidentally, Ireally don’t know how to handle corruption as an issue here. When speed is of the essence, financial rules are a non sequitur and yet public monies have to be accounted for. When I was asked this Iwould weakly talk of vigilance rules but this needs fresh thinking. The Japanese claim that if a Richter Scale 8 earthquake hits central Tokyo, in half an hour everyone would have been contacted. In our case, it takes around eight hours for outside assistance to reach the victims. We know that the greatest loss is in the first few hours. In Gujarat, Iwould always ask officers to be sent to Japan for training in the management of very large and densely populated regions – nobody else has the resources and experience that the Japanese do. But when you see the large crowd of schoolchildren visiting the Tokyo Disaster Management Centre, you know it is not just about resources and technology. Ultimately, it is people who matter.
India has a tradition of collaborating with and assisting people in traumatic situations. Let’s do it again. The writer is a former Union minister forpower; planning and science, and was vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi yalagh@gmail.com
URL: http://epaper.indianexpress.com/artMailDisp.aspx?article=23_05_2008_012_011&typ=1&pub=320