Paying the price for lessons not learnt

The death toll in the flash floods that hit Chennai and Tamil Nadu last week is hurtling towards the 500-mark, made considerably worse by bad planning. Take, for instance, the deaths in a Chennai corporate hospital’s ICU, whose basement generators were flooded, stopping oxygen supply to the hub located at the same low level. Greater thoughtlessness can’t be imagined, particularly as corrective steps should have been taken after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, where basement generators were flooded with seawater.

But corporate hospitals weren’t the only ones driven by greed. The saviours include the armed forces, the National Disaster Response Force, NGOs, local fire services, the police, electricity board, the corporate sector and countless individuals. The civic authorities may have been striving hard in their relief missions, but without the kind of ability others displayed. Sadly, many were driven by political compulsions.

The state machinery wasn’t the only culprit. All parties were guilty of pasting their leaders’ photos or their party symbols on relief material in a bid to derive political advantage as state elections are just months away. The seething public anger against politicians came through clearly, as a huge segment of the state’s 70-million-odd electorate has been directly affected by the floods, disrupting normal life and pounding the already creaky infrastructure of India’s Detroit and the coast.

The real tragedy is that it has been pointed out time and again that official India seems to be capable only of responding to emergencies rather than working through optimal decision-making to set up systems that will work smoothly in normal times and cope with extreme events. Without the monsoons, Indian civilisation would not have had such a rich history. Without the annual movement of moisture-laden clouds, modern India would be history, which only emphasises the point that to manage water, including its excess, is vital to efficient administration.

Had the civic authorities followed what the NGOs did in their digital management of relief materials and the logistics of moving them to reach true victims, they would have contributed much more effectively to disaster management. Some of the relief work has been impeded by plain obstructionism born out of misplaced thinking on the part of some unruly elements attempting to make political capital out of human misery. The officials could have done a lot better.