Disaster Management
in India - The Urgency of Fresh Thinking
Swami Vivekananda once visited a great sage of our country,
a very holy man and wrote: “We talked about our revered book- the Vedas, of
your Bible, of the Koran, and of the revered books in general. At the close of
our talk, this great sage asked me to go to the table and take-up the book; it
was a book, which, among other things, contained a forecast of the rainfall
during the year. The sage said, Read them. And I read out the quantity of rain
that was to fall. He said, now take the book and squeeze it. I did so and he
said, why my boy, not a drop of water comes out. Until the water comes out, it
is all book, book.”
This is also the story of disaster management in India. We
have a National Disaster Management Act, a National Disaster Management Authority
with the Prime Minister of India as its Chief, a country wide disaster
management apparatus, an impressive array of knowledge institutions, a full
fledged National Institute of Disaster Management and an over stocked library
of Guidelines, Plans, SOP’s and Office orders. It is time we squeeze them all
to count the drops! We have definitely progressed but we have a very long way
to go.
By the very nature of the challenge, the road to disaster
management has always been under construction and will remain so in the future
as well. It has long been realized that the road begins from the territory of
policy formulation, but the results will begin to trickle in only the day we
come out of the comfort-zone of the business as usual and bridge the gap between
our scientific and operating tempers and between the plan and its
implementation. In our straight –jacket style of functioning, we get easily
swayed when we see a logical, demand based approach to project identification,
a scholarly written feasibility report tuned to environmental sensitivities,
and a convincing environmental impact assessment. An exclusive chapter on
Integration of disaster risk reduction with the project planning makes us feel
that now is the time to take a break and hope for the things to happen on their
own, as we had planned. Have we ever thought whether it is the right road that
would lead us to the freedom from disasters?
Only one road can lead us to freedom from disasters and that
is the road passing through the culture of safety to be travelled in the
vehicle of non-violence with a deep sense of commitment to posterity. I have
lost no chance to express myself by repeating Antoine de Saint Exupéry‘s words:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up men to collect wood and don’t assign
them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of
the sea.”
The real world of disasters is far more complex than we can
singly or collectively imagine. In the real world, we can be only as successful
as our ability to foresee multiple scenarios of hazards, vulnerability and
risk. For decades, we have been in the business of making hazard maps and
printing atlases. Let us squeeze and stir all our hazard maps and atlases, and
count the drops. Sorry, we will have to wait until someone more serious and
scientific places the first, validated and user-friendly hazard map into our
hands. And imagine, if we can’t reliably anticipate the hazards before they
strike, how can we ever prevent them from happening?
We are a democratic country and in order to appear
democratic, we are perpetually engaged in discussion and planning, that leaves
us without much time to spare for implementation of plans. According to Netaji
Subhas Chandra Bose, “no real change in the history has ever been achieved by
discussion.” But his words did not suit our way of life. Discussion per se is
not bad, but when it comes to managing disasters, we have seen our plans
getting bogged down in the quicksand of endless discussion and become stale on
its way to the printing press. It is said that the devil is in the detail and
yet we prefer to ignore details and instead face the wrath of the devil. On the
other extreme are our people who would not move an inch beyond discussion
because of the paucity of data or absence of consensus. ” Reality is, after
all, too big for our frail understanding to fully comprehend. Nevertheless, we
have to build our life on the theory which contains maximum truth. We cannot
sit still because we cannot, or do not know the absolute truth,”said Netaji
Subhas Chandra Bose. “The finest of the plans are always ruined by the
littleness of those who ought to carry them out, for the Emperors can actually
do nothing”, said Bertolt Brecht.1
The use of clever or dishonest methods (chicanery) and sugar-coated
populist approaches have hurt us a great deal. Non transparent approaches in
the investigation and knee-jerk reporting often sully the disaster case records
and bury the truth deeper. We were taught in the classroom to walk slowly when
in a hurry. But in the race for supremacy in reporting, we fancy reporting as
we walk and document as we talk. As Richard Bach has said, “The world is your
exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though
you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or
nonsense, or to tear the pages.”2 But by not being honest, are we not robbing
the future generations of the awe inspiring grandeur of nature’s exposition? By
ignoring proof, logic and science, are we not ignoring our own future? Are we
not increasingly getting identified as the generation of editors rather than of
authorship?
From the Italian proverb “Alexander never did what he said
and Caesar never said what he did”, we infer that disaster managers are generally
seen to play Alexander’s role for the wrong reason. This is because of the
Hobson’s choice managers face in dealing with disaster scenarios as they
unfold, bearing little or no resemblance to those about which they had spoken.
We have to create systems in which our actions speak louder than our words and
we will feel free to act as Caesar did. Only when we will have the courage and
humility to confess that our plans were useless scraps of paper as testified by
the recent tragedies, that we will justifiably get license to plan. Einstein
once said, “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which
differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are ever
incapable of forming such opinions.” He further adds that, “we cannot solve the
problems we have created with the same thinking that created them”. And,
according to John Maynard Keynes, “Difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in
escaping the old ones.”
We have long been working with an ill-defined disaster
management strategy conceived in a comfort zone, reducing one of the most
challenging tasks to a hectic exercise in relief and response. With the advent
of the National Disaster Management Act of 2005 came the hope that the world
around us would begin to change from then onwards. We had hoped to see more of
prevention and mitigation, more of the culture of scientific scrutiny and
technological innovation, and more of an action than speeches. We seek
development, but what value is that development which fuel disasters and takes
us back to the zero-sum game? It is no choice, if we are asked to choose our
day between 12 hours of pain followed by 12 hours of pleasure, or for 12 hours
of pleasure followed with 12 hours of pain!
“There was an old owl, who lived in an Oak. The more he
heard, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, more he heard. O, if men were like
that wise old bird.”3 The time has come when speeches can wait and the endless
engagement with the design of wings can end. All we need is a vision, a sense
of direction and a will to succeed. “If a man does not know to what port he is
steering, no wind is favourable to him.” 4 Let us recall Ray Bradbury, who said
that, “You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on your
way down.”
Please listen, the last of the sparrow or sterling, which
wants to fly to freedom from disasters is watching our movies! And as Martin
Luther King, Jr, has said, “Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see
the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
Endnotes
Bertolt Brecht in Mother Courage, 1939.
Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant
Messiah
Cited from Punch.
Seneca
-
Prof RK Bhandari is a distinguished alumnus from IIT Mumbai, a Fellow of Indian National
Academy of Engineering and a recipient of the coveted Varne’s Medal for Excellence in Research and Practice of Landslides.
Other articles by Dr Bhandari are placed at
1 and
2
Article credit :-
Vivekananda International Foundation.
Praful Rao,
Kalimpong,
Dist Darjeeling
