The deluge in Calcutta was ‘something’.
“Are you alright, Sir?” I asked a venerable friend of mine in Calcutta over the telephone (which was working).
He was stoic. No self-pity, no ‘My god, Oh god, what a torment!’ None of that. I was reassured he was not too shaken by the rain and the resultant havoc. And if he was, he was not going to bother me with details.
Another was equally strong of spirit but more specific. Their house was flooded, he said. And there was no power. “But,” he said, “we have survived.” He could have been speaking for all earthlings. As of now.
A third was frank about his family’s luck. His house, he said, was on a kind of crest and so was spared the worst of the flooding. This was really fortunate for his mother, who is in her nineties, would have been most discomfited had she had to struggle to stay above water level.
The elder and elderly sister of yet another friend had to find a ‘tall’ jeep and move out of her totally washed out and cut-off ground-level home to her brother’s apartment to just about manage.
Several families hired trucks to move to shelters if they could find any.
But what of those who could not have found either the money or the means to move to higher and safer elevations?
And what of the sick, the infirm, who could not have helped themselves or be helped? And those who, during the hours of the inundation, fell ill, suffered strokes or heart attacks, and what of expectant mothers who needed to be rushed to hospital?
One’s imagination hesitates to go further. And yet, the bitter fact is that the flooding Calcutta has just been through is only a trailer for worse crises not in Calcutta alone but just about everywhere. That is climate change for you, the morphing of climates from seasons into shockers.
Global warming and sea-level rise are going to eat into coasts and coastlines remorselessly, and I am not saying something to sound sensational when I say that sooner than later there will be such a thing as the geophysical map of India we have known for decades and such a thing as the georeal map of India — narrower, tighter, with familiar features like the Himalaya showing their rock-selves minus snow cover, rivers flowing differently, today’s beaches being lapped by the sea.
If the man-made torment of climate change is staring us in the face, the inscrutable reality of a mega earthquake predicted by seismologists is tapping our shoulders.
The impending fate of the Himalaya by both glacier melt and earthquake risk is a concurrent torment.
But this column is not about these known risks. Nor about our known apathy to them.
It is quite incredible how soon we forget traumas like what hit Calcutta recently. The ‘business’ of life does not slacken.
Festivals and festivities must revive and every trauma must be forgotten. And governments step in, with such relief measures as time and budgets allow.
But I am not on the theme of the assured direnesses ahead of us but on a related subject which occasioned a remarkable speech by Nabam Tuki, a former chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, on September 27. Like it happens very often, this speech did not get the attention it deserved. Why, for that matter, do tough messages calling for tough action by the State and the society not get the attention that so and so’s slamming of so and so, and so and so’s demanding an apology from such and such, get? Tuki was speaking at the 12th Sustainable Mountain Development Summit in Dehradun.
Asking for a change from reaction mode to precaution and prevention mode, Tuki said, “We are excellent in giving relief after a disaster but we must invest more in early warning systems, resilient infrastructure and community training, move from fragmented to integrated approaches.” Projects and urban planning often work in silos, he said, and then turned to another vital facet of disasters — the human dimension. “Let us not forget,” he said, “that behind every statistic lies a human story. A farmer in Tawang losing crops to untimely rains. A child in Kinnaur cut off from school by landslides. A family in Kedarnath rebuilding home after floods. Their struggles must guide our policies. Development is not just about GDP; it is about dignity, safety and hope.”
I do not know Tuki and I do not need to know more than what the report of his speech has given me. The reader should not think this column is doing some PR for him. Heavens, no. I am just impressed by the long glance he is giving to the reality of our vulnerabilities and of our utterly skewed priorities.
But there is another side to the matter that I wish to turn to and conclude with.
Why do governments fall short of money for strengthening our resistance to disasters? Why do chief ministers have to demand more than what they are given by way of disaster relief? What Calcutta went through in end-September, Punjab and Haryana went through only a few days earlier. Cut off from the world in Gurgaon by floods, a retired veteran of administrative experience bemoaned the “massive failure of the political and appointed executive”. “What can I do with Rs 1,600 crores?” screamed rain-sodden Punjab’s chief minister, Bhagwant Mann. He said the need was of Rs 13,800 crore.
The Centre has its fund limits and has its reasons for asking state governments if they are utilising their own disaster relief allocations and methods optimally. But why is it that for some things money just does not seem to be an issue? I can understand the defence and security of the country being an area where the Centre has to be trusted fully to know how much to spend and when. Money cannot be stinted for those. But natural disasters are a form of terror that has no malefic intent to hurt, but hurts nonetheless. Just as we cannot neglect preparedness in national security against invasions or terror attacks, we cannot neglect preparedness against natural upheavals. There ought to be, in a country like ours, a Union minister in sole (not shared) charge of disaster management who is as prominent and confidence inspiring as a defence minister or home minister.
And he or she must be able to spend on the earthy ineluctables of disaster management what we are spending on divine optionals like reaching Mars, landing an Indian on the moon and fairy-land dreams of converting Great Nicobar into a postmodern duplicate of Singapore, Hong Kong, Sun City and Hollywood. He or she must be able to suggest that we put off thoughts of hosting the Olympics.
True, there is something called izzat. Something called maan, sammaan, something like a nation’s imagic compulsions. But must we let city after city, town after town, farmland after farmland fall to rain and to storm, to quake and to dam-burst, just because we could not anticipate the shock or find money enough to handle it? What izzat will be left, what maan and sammaan, if we soar the skies, become an Indian Olympiad, but the ground on which we live is sodden, split or scorched?
We as a people, like the Calcuttans I have mentioned, might be stoic and innovative, we may overcome our torments, but our inner strengths as a people should support not substitute government’s reflexive priorities.
Before it is too late, before the Earth quakes and cracks as it is projected to, in and under the Himalaya, before flash floods due to glacier melts are followed by parched riverbeds spreading drought, before cyclones do worse than they have along our coasts, we need to rewire our financial and priority circuits in a way that secures us against disasters and calamities.
Mars and the moon are not going away. The Great Nicobar can be allowed to breathe its own pure, not our metropolis’s, air. The Olympics can wait for another four or eight years.
The spectre of direness ahead can be ignored only to immeasurable peril.