HEALTH-INDIA: No Gov’t Sweat as Thousands Die From Heat Wave

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 9 2003 (IPS) - A blistering heat wave sweeping across India over the past three weeks is estimated to have killed more than 2,000 people – deaths that public health experts say were preventable because precious little is being done to save the poor and vulnerable from extreme changes in temperature.

”Even simple communication to the public on ordinary precautions against dehydration and sunstroke may have been enough to prevent hundreds of deaths,” medical doctor and leading public health campaigner Mira Shiva said in an interview.

Likewise, Shiva said many of the 1,500-odd deaths that have been reported from southern Andhra Pradesh, the worst affected state, appeared to have been the result not only of dehydration but also of drinking contaminated water.

”Each year more and more people are dying from cold waves followed by heat waves. Yet there is no single central government agency that even monitors the number of people dying from temperatures that range between freezing point and 50 degrees Centigrade,” added P V Unnikrishnan, an expert on disaster management with the People’s Health Movement.

Unnikrishnan said it was difficult to get any government agency to ”take even the minimum responsibility for deaths from temperature extremes, simply because it does not fit their definitions of disaster”.

One agency that might ideally have fit the bill is the National Disaster Management Cell, except that this functions under the Ministry of Agriculture. ”Heat and cold waves are not included under natural disasters,” said R.K. Singh, chief of the agency.

Singh said that the national disaster body’s role was limited to assisting the different states in tackling natural disasters like cyclones, earthquakes, floods and droughts, and that it was really up to state governments to respond to the needs of citizens when it came to temperature extremes.

Pleas to the central government from Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu to classify heat waves as a natural calamity have drawn no response thus far.

Unnikrishnan, based in southern Bangalore city, said that officialdom – state or central – was not keen even to record the deaths that occur each year from temperature extremes, because most of the victims were extremely poor and marginalised people.

”Even the media is not sensitised to climatic extremes. Unlike in the case of cyclones or earthquakes, there are no dramatic pictures that can be published on the front pages or television footage that can capture public imagination,” Unnikrishnan said.

”The relatively better-off people take care of themselves without waiting for government help,” he added, indicating the array of sleek air conditioners, heaters, humidifiers, desert coolers and other climate-control gadgetry readily available in the market.

Workers with relief organisations say they are better attuned to preventing deaths from the extreme cold weather that strikes northern India in December and January, rather the heat waves that affect most of the country in the worst summer months of May and June.

Said Jayant Kumar, spokesman for the Church’s Auxiliary for Social Action (CASA): ”In winter we distribute blankets to poor people that we can source from other countries, but we find handling heat waves more complex. The problem is so widespread we don’t know what to do or where to begin.”

Kumar said that the government ought to have a policy to cope with heat waves that would cover the provision of shelters, safe drinking water and hygiene issues, and also see to providing quick emergency medical attention for those suffering from heat strokes.

”At least there could be a system of warning people to stay indoors when heat waves are impending as well and providing basic information. After all, these are measures with minimum cost implication,” Kumar said.

Temperature extremes have been particularly harsh this year. Just six months ago, zero and sub-zero temperatures in large parts of northern India resulted in the deaths of more than 800 people – most of them from the poorer sections of the population in the rural parts of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with 170 million people.

According to Mira Shiva, one reason for the increasing number of deaths being reported as a result of temperature extremes is the ever-worsening nutrition status of the roughly 40 percent of India’s one billion people who are classified as living below the poverty line.

Last year, the World Bank, in its report ‘Poverty in India: Challenge of Uttar Pradesh’, described the situation in this state as a global challenge because it was home to eight percent of the world’s poor.

”These reports as well as government statistics on the declining offtake of grain from the public distribution system (PDS) tell a story of how people are being able to buy less food – and are consequently less able to withstand extreme climatic conditions such as cold weather in Uttar Pradesh,” Shiva said.

Similarly, Shiva said, in states like Andhra Pradesh there has been a serious depletion of the simple shade offered by tree cover as poor people resort to increased tree-felling for their fuel and fodder needs.

”No one factors in the environmental costs of felling trees or their effect on the water table, which in turn results in reducing the availability of potable water, which can be deadly for marginalised people in scorching summers like the one this year,” Shiva said.

Said Swami Agnivesh, one of India’s best known human rights activists: ”It is time that the state started spending to protect people from the vagaries of the weather rather than squandering it on fighting terrorism because far more people are dying from the former than the latter.”

According to Swami Agnivesh, deaths from the cold, extreme heat or starvation are a bigger blot on the record of the state simply because they are preventable and predictable. The real enemy, he added, is a known one: poverty.