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The number of deaths in the Nepal earthquake has touched almost 6,000 by Thursday morning. Unofficial estimates suggest it to be well over 10,000, including several hundreds across India. A 7.9 Richter scale earthquake that hit central Nepal on Saturday noon, April 25, 2015, has been followed by as many as 110 aftershocks that are above 4 on the Richter scale.
The loss of human lives, property, livestock, etc. will perhaps never be fully accounted for. Partly, it is because, among all the natural disasters, an earthquake has an additional diabolism – human ingenuity so far has utterly failed to predict even a tentative timing and place of its occurrence. All of the human race is thus condemned to face its wrath at its fullest, without any precaution. As such, the only alternative left at human disposal to ameliorate the hardship of the quake victims is to carry out a rescue, relief and rehabilitation (3R) operation that is immediate, effective and enough, commensurate to the expanse of the disaster.
Unfortunately, the harrowing tales of victims in the recent Nepal earthquake tells an altogether different story. The State has failed to carry out the 3R operation at an acceptable level even after the sixth day of the quake. The rescue-and-relief efforts have been scanty at best and inaccessible to the majority of victims, even in the areas like Bhaktapur which is barely 10 kilometres from the country's Central Secretariat. The situation is particularly awful in dispersed, remote, hostile hilly terrains like Barpak village of Gorkha district, the epicenter of the quake. The government has been pushed on the defensive with growing criticism of the inefficiency in its post-crisis response. Political top hats are surprisingly absent from the scene.
The paradoxes are also many. The 3R operation remains complete ad hoc, despite substantive and continued inflow of relief assistance, mainly from abroad. A huge quantity of relief materials have piled up at the Kathmandu international airport. Many of these items were sent by donors on their own choice, and not based on the needs on the ground. The government has failed even to channelise some available materials that are instantly usable.
The situation as such exposes a number of chronic deficiencies in handling a crisis of this scale.
First, the nation never seriously took the fact that it is located in the seismically highly volatile Himalayan region. Second, Nepal never prepared itself to face a disaster of such a gigantic scale through financing for scientific research, to set up dedicated disaster management institutions, and to inform and educate the people on how to react and what to expect during an actual earthquake. To be sure, the public in general also never paid much heed to some important awareness efforts from the government or NGOs. Anecdotally speaking, people often changed channels when some television programmes aired the shows like post-earthquake drill and mock exercises. And third, when the crisis actually hit, the government was too late to respond, failed to prioritise needs, effectively mobilise the executing agencies, or coordinate among providers of relief assistance, both domestic and foreign.
Immediately after the recent quake, both Nepali and Indian governments announced cash compensation to the families of the dead, which in fact was a misplaced priority and no more than a politically correct government ritual. In these circumstances, no cash can substitute the help to immediately dig out lives buried in debris, provide safe drinking water, ready-to-eat food and tents for those who lost their homes. Physical presence of rescue teams at the disaster site with proper equipment and instantly usable life-support materials should always be the priority. The cash support is important, but it is low down on the priority list for such situations.
Not only Nepal, but perhaps all of South Asia lacks completely dedicated institutions for the 3R operation which are not only equipped with human and technical skills, but also with sort of quasi-judicial authority to regulate the aspects of building and public works codes vis-a-vis riskiness of potential natural disasters.
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The existing emergency operation offices are ill-equipped in almost all respects of resources, have only fragmented legal mandate, and are heavily dependent on temporarily pooled personnel from security establishments. Their focus, post-crisis, is on the most basic and short-term 3R, that lacks a long-term, sustainable vision for disaster preparedness and response.
When a crisis hits, things are made more painful by rumours and misinformation, absurd predictions by rumour-mongers that is often followed by a mob psychology amplified by social media. The mainstream media has a great social responsibility to fill this gap with fact-based and useful information but it turns out that majority of mediapersons in our sub-continent are also terribly ill-trained to understand the scientific dimensions of such disasters, or the effect of their often-slanted, half-baked, and hurried coverage of events.
We need a clear departure from all these trends to make a difference in future crises, if not the current one. Deliberations at critical levels of the ‘hows’ and ‘whats’ of these must now begin.
Achyut Wagle is a Kathmandu-based journalist who writes mainly on economic and development issues. Twitter@Beitwag
