After the storm

Cyclone Vardah has departed Chennai, leaving behind the customary trail of destruction. A day later, power supply is still down in major parts of the Tamil Nadu capital, transportation services are skeletal at best, telecom and data connectivity is patchy and businesses are badly impacted. The people of Chennai, of course, have been through this kind of trauma before, and have gone around quietly rebuilding their lives. While the response from civic and administrative machinery has been better and faster than what was visible during last December’s deluge, the cyclone and its aftermath have raised some fundamental questions about whether our cities — and not just Chennai, which just happens to be the latest victim — are at all prepared to deal with such cataclysmic events. Of course, nature cannot be changed. Cyclones, floods, droughts and earthquakes will occur sometime or the other. What is critical is whether a rapidly urbanising India, with a third of its population packed into overcrowded and infrastructurally stretched cities, is in a position to deal with the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster.

The answer, as the experiences of even our mega cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai have shown, is ‘no’. Civic administrations are not only severely underfunded and under-equipped for the task, but have critical skill gaps when it comes to responding to a crisis. The standard operating protocol followed in such cases is outdated, and key services like the police and fire departments have neither the equipment nor the training to deal with the challenge on hand. While the Centre has made a start by building a national disaster response force, and the armed forces are both trained and equipped to deal with such emergencies, the complicated lines of command and overlapping authorities between civic, State and Central machineries often ensures that such assistance is usually sought too late to be effective in preventing severe damage or limiting loss of life.

More serious is the lack of adherence to laws, standards and practices, which has left most of our cities waiting for a disaster to happen. Building standards and safety regulations are observed more in the breach. Public health infrastructure, neglected for decades, is already at breaking point, and usually collapses when faced with a mass event, impacting the poor the most. Civic authorities not only fail to impose standards, but are often guilty of violating them themselves. Unless there is a paradigm shift in thinking, the next major disaster in one of our cities could cause cataclysmic damage. We need to change the way we plan, prepare and respond to such events. This change has to be comprehensive, covering planning, training and equipping the concerned authorities adequately to deal with the task. Above all, there has to be a change in mindset, which has to come from the political leadership. The lessons of Cyclone Vardah should not be forgotten just because the roads have cleared.