Himalayan tsunami: Uttarakhand damage can't be blamed on nature's fury alone

Cloudbursts, landslides and flash floods are an annual affair in Uttarakhand. The monsoon of 2010 brought with it such massive losses of lives, property, crops and infrastructure that the state said its development clock had been set back by a decade. Things are much, much worse this year. With many highways damaged, bridges washed away, electricity and phone networks down, several ravaged places continue to be marooned. Expect the final tally to be horrifying. After all, the speediest monsoon in over 50 years has just dumped over 400% more than average rainfall over Uttarakhand and neighbouring Himachal Pradesh.


Himachal chief minister Virbhadra Singh blames nature's fury — against which all disaster management must, presumably, fail. This characterisation is deceptive. India's premier disaster management body neither has implemented any project successfully nor has much information over progress at the state level. As for the Met, it's passing the buck by saying the state government had been warned about torrential rains on Friday night. Even if local administration had understood the implications of meteorological data, it didn't have much time to put out effective warnings across a state where 65% of the area is under forests. 

The bottom line is that in a region that has more reason than most for disaster preparedness, both local and central arms of the government have been greatly wanting. Personnel of the Army, Border Roads Organisation and Indo-Tibetan Border Police are trying their best. But a couple of dozen helicopters flying a few hundred sorties a day to rescue a region full of distressed citizens is emblematic of millennial India's broken promises. Some of these sorties were abandoned for want of fuel, while helplines are not giving nearly as much help as they should. 

The growing frequency of extreme climactic events is emboldening the claim that hydropower projects, encroachments of riverbeds by buildings, and blasting of mountains to build roads are making hill states more susceptible to disaster. But with a growing share of global economic activity becoming concentrated in disaster-prone places from Bangkok to Florida, building the human and physical infrastructure needed to tackle natural disaster is the best way forward, accompanied by credible mechanisms for ensuring compliance with environmental regulations. Meanwhile, as realisation trickles in that Uttarakhand's distress may be as bad as the tsunamiwhich struck Indian shores in 2004, relief operations too need to be ramped up to a comparable level.

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