The cause is known. The Indian tectonic plate, moving northwards into Central Asia at around 5 cm a year, triggered the massive earthquake that scientists had for years predicted would hit the Himalayan country. The effect on a vulnerable poverty-riddled region which has extremely lax building construction standards has been devastating. The search for survivors is top priority: India’s Air Force and commercial aircraft were the first to land in Nepal after the tragedy struck, with vital rescue teams and disaster management gear.
A lot more must be done in extending emergency help, including in the avalanche-hit Everest region. While parts of north India were also hit in Saturday’s tragedy, our top priority must be to give Nepal all possible medical and technical help, besides financial assistance.
The fact is India can do a lot more for Nepal. An urgent task is to help restore heritage buildings of Kathmandu’s Durbar Square, historically the seat of government, and the temple town of Bhaktapur. Having restored Angkor Wat in Cambodia, we have the expertise to bring back to life an important legacy of the Himalayan nation. We are also best placed logistically to assist in these matters and resources should not be a constraint, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised in phone calls to Nepal’s PM and President.
India can, in fact, go even a step further, and take the lead in giving teeth to a Saarc disaster mitigation management plan. As the most powerful and obvious leader of the group, India can formalise the setting up of a system of people and machines to handle floods and earthquakes, among the commonest disasters to strike the region, more so in landlocked Nepal with its streams and fragile ecology of mountain slopes, which is easily upset by the type of human exploitation of natural resources. Of course, there is little that man can do against the power of nature when it comes to the shifting of tectonic plates, a movement so powerful that millions of years ago it led to the very formation of the Himalayas and the roof of the world in Mount Everest.
Scientists are hazarding guesses about bigger earthquakes in store for the region, although geologists have noted a spacing of about eight decades between cataclysmic events in eastern Nepal, like the years between the 8.1 temblor in 1934 and the 7.9 quake on the Richter scale now. While rescue and rehabilitation is the top priority, disaster preparedness must be set in motion very soon for all Saarc countries to be able to handle events that are exacerbated by the general poverty levels of half the population and building standards that are nowhere near what they should be in the most vulnerable seismic zones.
