DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: UNDP Chief Visits Cyclone Village

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

KHATIARI, India, Feb 16 2001 (IPS) - “The storm took away everything we had. What is there left to protect now?” laments Radhi Kandi in this hamlet in India’s eastern coastal Orissa state.

The 60-year-old woman has vivid memories of the October 1999 ‘super-cyclone’, which arose from the Bay of Bengal and wiped away the fishing hamlet where she had lived all her life.

“Everything was blown away — trees, boats, our homes, our men. And the salty sea water that came in, made sure that we could never grow anything on our farms ever again,” she says.

She was one of the few who managed to make it in time to the concrete-roofed school, the only building left standing.

More than 10,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands made homeless by the cyclone, which struck the coastal areas of Orissa, with winds reaching 300 km per hour

Comprising neat rows of thatch-roofed, mud-walled huts, Khatiari has since been relocated to a tract of government land further inland from where it once was.

The houses are specially designed to withstand high velocity sea storms. The walls of Radhi’s house have a bamboo frame and the ‘aerodynamic’ thatch roof almost touches the ground.

The new village is part of the post-cyclone rehabilitation work by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP). Working with people’s groups, this is showing locals how they can protect themselves from future cyclones that periodically lash the coastal region.

However, the rehabilitation has centred on self-help and during his mid-February visit here, UNDP chief Mark Malloch-Brown said he was impressed by the community effort that had gone into rebuilding Khatiari.

Malloch-Brown arrived here by helicopter Thursday to a warm welcome from the villagers. Placards with details of community- based preparedness for future cyclones and work by village women’s groups, were put up along the village road.

Among the places he inspected, were the village school and the primary health centre, which were restarted by the National U.N. Volunteers.

“After the cyclone, like in many other villages, the primary health centre completely collapsed, along with the vaccines and even the valuable immunisation records. We had to start from scratch,” says Devadasan, a doctor with the World Health Organisation (WHO), who heads the U.N. Volunteers here.

The U.N. agencies in India set up an Inter-Sectoral Team (IST) to coordinate among themselves and with the scores of NGOs (non- governmental organisations) and bilateral aid agencies, involved in post-cyclone rehabilitation work.

Malloch-Brown said the IST, with support from the British government’s Department for International Development (DfID), is now focussing attention on tackling the water shortage in the area caused by scanty rainfall in the past year.

For this, it is trying to revive traditional rain-water harvesting methods. Programmes are also on for recharging ground water.

The U.N. system is to spend some 60 million U.S. dollars this year on “loss recovery, livelihood alternatives and disaster preparedness” for the area, the UNDP chief said. However, he added this amount was modest compared to real needs.

“But unlike in other countries, there is help from within India and the U.N. system could draw upon this country’s intellectual wealth, experience and ability to address its own problems,” he said.

According to Saroj Jha, the energetic IST leader, the team has been able to “influence thinking within the government.” Jha is a senior Indian government official on deputation to the UNDP.

This has led the government to change the watershed management policy in the state in a way that favours the poorest peasants, said Jha.

But the concerted efforts of government agencies, NGOs and U.N. agencies, have still not been able to tackle a big problem worrying the 42-odd families in Khatiari.

They still have no title to the strip of government land on which the village was rebuilt. Their huts stand between the large plots of rich landlords and the treacherous coast they were forced to abandon.

Explained a government officer: “The government can’t hand over the land to the villagers because that would set a precedent and there would be demands for similar grants from the millions of people rendered homeless by the cyclone.”