INDIA: Three Weeks After Quake, Relief Still to Reach All

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Feb 13 2001 (IPS) - Nearly three weeks after India’s worst earthquake devastated a large part of western coastal Gujarat state, authorities and foreign relief agencies still face an uphill task reaching out to those in need.

Thousands of relief workers are busy taking medical and other help to the quake victims, which is expected to take several months.

However, both foreign relief agencies and Indian authorities admit that help is still to reach a sizeable number of those affected by the Jan. 26 quake, which measured 7.9 on the Richter scale.

According to Patrick Fuller of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, it would be months before the full extent of the tragedy could be assessed.

Hundreds of villages that were flattened by the quake, are yet to get any assistance, the Red Cross spokesman was quoted as saying in news reports Tuesday from Gujarat.

Indian authorities now project the quake’s death toll to be around 35,000. International relief agencies working in Gujarat estimate that over a million people have become homeless and in need of shelter, food, drinking water and health care.

The Red Cross was one of the first to enter the area. It has set up a 400-bed field hospital — said to be the world’s largest — in the worst hit Bhuj district, located 20 km from the quake’s epicentre.

The hospital is providing medical assistance to some 200,000 people and expected to soon reach out to another 100,000 people. It will continue working for about a year. A similar hospital has been set up by Israel.

Just three days after the disaster, the Red Cross set up a water plant that is providing 40,000 litres of drinking water every day to the people in Bhuj.

India is to get 300 million U.S. dollars as immediate quake relief from the World Bank, which will give another one billion dollars for a long-term quake rehabilitation programme. The Asian Development Bank is to give 700 million dollars as loan and 300 million dollars as grant.

The U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP) has begun a four million- dollar emergency food programme for some 300,000 people. The European Union (EU), which announced an initial grant of six million dollars, said it would give more to rebuild schools and provide basic health care.

Pedro Medrano, WFP’s India chief, said Gujarat was already food insecure before the earthquake struck, because of a severe drought.

“Even before the disaster, half the children in the affected region were underweight and the mothers suffering from malnutrition,” he said.

Relief workers say there is no shortage of material assistance, but taking it to the needy is not easy. The large amount of relief material airlifted every day into Gujarat from across the world, is being largely handled by scores of foreign NGOs (non-governmental organisations).

The provincial government of Gujarat state, also ruled by India’s main ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is playing a key role in coordinating the distribution of foreign assistance. State authorities are distributing relief material arranged by the Indian government.

Gujarat’s Home Minister Hiren Pandya, who is supervising the government relief operations, admitted that there was lack of proper coordination.

But he attributed this to “numerous agencies, both domestic and international that had landed in Gujarat, all of a sudden, bringing in relief material, all of which cannot be used.”

According to Michel Caillouet, head of the EU delegation in India, who toured the quake-flattened Kutch area two weeks after the disaster, there has been some slippage on the part of the state administration with regard to the distribution of relief.

But Caillouet added that “it is impossible to be perfect in these matters.”

The EU official said that European countries have set up an informal European Relief Information Centre for better coordination among the various EU NGOs working in the area.

“There will be special emphasis on reaching assistance to badly-affected smaller towns and remote areas,” he was quoted as saying after visiting some of villages that are still to get proper attention from relief workers.

One such village is Lodai, a hamlet of 3,000 people, some 20 km from Bhuj. Lodai’s plight was ‘discovered’ by Indian Army troops, five days after the earthquake struck.

Red Cross spokesman Fuller said the fact that units of the army happened to be around the area, made a huge difference to relief efforts.

There are also villages like Kukma, also in Bhuj district, which have been ‘flooded’ with tents and medical supplies.

“There is total chaos with officials unaware of what they need to do with aid piling up,” said Akhilesh Sharma of the New Delhi-based Helpage India, which has sent mobile medical units to the area.

India’s political leaders have even begun using the quake to run down their rivals. After a three-day tour of Kutch that ended Monday, the leader of the main opposition Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, accused the BJP Gujarat government of bias in the distribution of assistance.

“The victims I met, complained of bias in distribution of relief by the state government,” the Italian-born widow of assassinated premier Rajiv Gandhi, was quoted as saying.

“All (affected) are human beings. It doesn’t matter who they are or which community they belong to. This is no occasion to play politics,” Gandhi added.

She was referring to allegations by the party’s rivals, that the Hindu nationalist BJP was ignoring members of Hindu-majority India’s main minority Muslim community, in the relief effort.