This piece was written a few days after the Kutch earthquake of 2001 when I used to stay in Gandidham!
I started wondering –since when has a car started stuttering so much on having a flat tyre? - Must be a broken axle; But hey! This is not the familiar Ambassador car of my childhood but a Maruti 800 and it doesn’t have an axle! I stopped the car, switched off the ignition and yet the bumpy ride continued. It was then that realization dawned that we were experiencing an earthquake.
People had just started rushing out of their houses .The cows on the road, and Gandhidham does have plenty of them, had gone berserk and were running about wildly. The sky above was filled with birds chirping away incessantly and in a frantic fashion -and then dead silence for some time-the effect of the quake was sinking in.
Day 0
Returning halfway from the office, where I was headed for, I saw high-rise buildings, which had collapsed, on either side of the road. And there was a surprising lack of confusion and panic-the only people running helter skelter seems to be Bengali/Oriya migrant laborers. A truck comes around asking for volunteers for rescue effort. There seems to be some order to the madness-petrol and diesel supplies are immediately rationed and are being given only for emergency and relief services. However communication is totally cut off and we keep our ears close to the radio only to hear details of the Republic day parade in Delhi! From noon onwards, the local radio station starts giving out the bare facts and asks listeners to relay the news onwards to Rajkot and Ahmedabad since Kutch is presently cut-off from the rest of the country. Even the satellite phones issued to the Kandla Port trust after the cyclone of 1998,are non functional.
Day 1
The day after the earthquake four emergency telephone lines are made functional in the main telephone exchange building and there is an orderly queue with a lone policeman keeping an eagle’s eye over the proceedings. People are being allowed to make calls free of charge to their relatives to relay the news. Most of the people standing in the queue are survivors or people like us, lucky enough to remain untouched by nature’s fury. People who have lost their near and dear ones do not seem to very keen, and are certainly not in a state, to relay the news to their relatives.
Food kitchens have been set up and they start providing food to all the people rendered homeless and even to others who are too scared to enter their homes.
The general mood is not one of panic, rather it is one of silent defiance-the faces seem to say-we have seen ghastlier scenes before (during the partition), we are seeing them now and if required we shall overcome whatever else the Almighty might have in store for us.
This is one of the more prosperous regions of the country and a substantial percentage of the population are from the Sindh region in Pakistan who have come here during and after the partition and their comment on the state of things is telling-we came to Kutch after partition and started our life here staying on the road and we are back on the road again! Two phones which miraculously are functional in the neighborhood are immediately converted into help lines-they are manned round the clock and the persons manning the phone seem to have information about all the buildings in Gandhidham and neighboring areas-each caller in turn is told to pass on a message to someone else regarding the existence of this functional phoneline. The calls multiply through the night and each and every call is painstaking answered-this is not an NGO at work but an individual helping in the relief work unsung and unannounced. Mild tremors continue through the night and the vigil starts. News pour in from other parts of Kutch-we are lucky; though loss of property in Gandhidham is substantial, the loss of life in other towns like Bacchau, Anjar and Bhuj is much much more.
We have to stand in an orderly queue to procure the morning papers with their customary photos of death and destruction but the reporting gives the game away-it is apparent that the press reporter has landed at Bhuj airport, taken a car around for 100 odd kms and flown back to Ahmedabad the same day and made a report on the destruction.
In this country public service does not include disaster management services-that is entirely done by voluntary agencies-even managing the endless voluntary agencies doing yeoman service and directing aid to those needing them most is done by the agencies themselves -we are standing in front of a building razed to the ground which housed the office of a colleague-a gentleman from the Baroda chamber of commerce comes around and wants to know whether any help is required at that site-we politely decline.
All the relief teams, which are now all over the place, are all people who have come on their own. Somehow there is nobody who has been put in charge of coordinating the relief. This is a country that runs on individual initiative –we are a nation of individuals-ask us to form a team of a ten or dozen persons and we will make a mess of it
Day2
Search and rescue operation in the multi-storied building in front of our house, which has collapsed, is in full swing. Once in a while, a crowd gathers-it means that a body is being recovered. Some people are rescued alive notably kids and aged persons. They apparently have a higher chance of survival than others because they don’t make any conscious attempt to break free when trapped and thus conserve vital body fluids and calories when it is most required.
The army jawans start clearing the debris in an effort to look for survivors under the rubble.and they have come with their own communication equipment. Foreign rescue workers have also started pouring in and the difference between a developing country and a super industrialized nation is stark-our men are using pick-axes and shouts of “Koi Hai”; the Swiss teams have come with sniffer dogs and heat seeking lasers which can track anybody still breathing inside the debris with pin point accuracy!
There is a concerted effort to kill rumors but some are too strong to be overcome since relatives from outside the country are phoning them in like the epicenter moving towards Ahmedabad and CNN predicting a bigger tremor at a certain time!
The typical panic buying of petrol and diesel starts but this is one area where government moves in swiftly-abundant supply is provided to all the petrol filling stations in the area and in a day the queues disappear -people realize that fuel is available in plenty.
Kutchis have strong links to Mumbai , one million of their brethren reside there and the maximum relief initiative from within the country is from that city.
But what sets Kutch apart is the mood-it is not one of despair. And the famed Gujarati philanthropy is at work. A complete hospital is being shifted out of Bombay and into Bhuj by the Sadhu Vaswani trust.
And wonder of wonders-vegetables and daily groceries are available at the same price as before and there seems to be a conscious effort to prevent anyone from taking advantage of a disaster.
Day 3
Bank employees cling on to their public sector image-Employees of one of the more dynamic PSU bank are having a meeting to finalize their plans of leaving the place enmasse after handing over the keys of the bank to their regional headquarters at Ahmedabad-they seem to have forgotten that banking is an essential service and the goodwill that any bank can generate by being the first to open their doors after the quake will generate additional business in crores-but alas profit and goodwill are not words you will find in the the dictionary of our PSU bank employees.
The Cellular phone companies are part of the new economy and it shows-the two service providers in the area are competing neck to neck to vie for the top honors of being the first to restore communication links after the disaster. Their services are now up and running-against a normal traffic of 30,000 calls per hr they are handling 120,000 calls per hour and additional equipment are still being flown in to set up additional centers at Bhuj and Anjar.Calls within Gujarat are being offered free by them and through public service they want to attract and retain customer loyalty.
Our bureaucracy is in action-The chairman of the Kandla Port trust, under pressure from the powers that be in Delhi, who would like to tell the world that a vital installation is in working order, has declared the port open and in operation. Then realization dawns-the jetties are in no condition to receive ships on their berths and all the earthmoving equipment which will be required for discharging the cargo have been put in use for relief operation. The port users association creates a hue and cry and ultimately the Port trust chairman relents and the port is declared closed until February 3.
Day 4
The customary black cats on the road-it means a VVIP is on his way. Somehow the sight of anyone in power evokes disgust even if the person concerned is trying his best to help in some way.
Day 5
It is time to get back to work. Lives and property have been lost and the whole town of Gandhidham looks like one big garbage dump but life has to go on and human memory is notoriously short. Today the cyclone of 1998 is just a distant memory.
I stop and wonder-for the last one year the shipping community the world over has been pre-occupied with the sinking of the vessel Erika-it was a successful rescue operation in severe rough weather where not a single life was lost and yet it stays in the news-here in Kutch the toll is upwards of 30,000 and rising and nobody as yet knows when that counter will finally come to a full stop.
And the after effects don’t stop-in the course of the day we feel about two or three imaginary tremors and every time there is a bump on the road-we wonder is it the undulation on the road or are we experiencing another shock!!
Guess the effect of the earthquake on the mind will take some time to wear off.
Sunayan Sanatani
Gandhidham
