THE grim reality of the colossal loss of lives and massive destruction of the habitat caused by the October eight earthquake is beginning to sink into the national consciousness.
Grieving continues, despite the miraculous rescues even a week after the event, but it is now accompanied with fear and uncertainty about the future. The generosity that was triggered by the shock is beginning to get jaded as apprehensions, if not cynicism, about its misuse, which people discounted initially, are beginning to rise.
The uncertainty about the future is also creeping in, although the general feeling among both the victims and people far away from the scene of the disaster is one of hope and a strong sense of solidarity.
As surviving victims, some still trapped in their inaccessible abodes, obtain trickles of food, water and much needed medical assistance, though not enough of tents and blankets, provided by an extraordinarily wide and deep response from within and outside the country, some rather disturbing questions are being raised: What could have been done to prevent the scale, if not the occurrence, of the disaster that struck?
Why was the response so tardy in the beginning and what will be the impact of the earthquake on the livelihood of those affected? And what can be done to help the families recover? These questions are neither new nor impossible to answer. They need to be addressed in the wider perspective of the relationship between disaster and development. For, the magnitude of the resulting disaster is directly linked to prior development choices made by the governments at different levels, local communities, and international actors.
Before launching a full-scale relief and rehabilitation programme it is, therefore, necessary to analyse the lacunae that exist in our policies that have exacerbated the damage caused by the earthquake.
Although at present early warning systems for earthquake are not available, geologists, engineers and other physical scientists should be given more resources to undertake detailed research on the country’s topography, with a view to understanding the soil structure and rock formation in different areas which are prone to earthquakes and to developing guidelines for building codes in those areas which can be strictly enforced.
Similarly, a significant portion of available resources should be spent on understanding and seeking to counter the driving processes, physical, economic and social that lie behind the current devastation that are responsible for this increase in the frequency and magnitude of disaster occurrence. These processes include: rapid urbanization with impoverished settlements increasingly located on steep slopes, along tectonic fault lines, in ravines, as well as along flood plains, on unprotected riverbanks, coastlines, or near dangerous industrial facilities.
In order to properly understand these processes, there is a need to establish a multi-disciplinary Task Force of distinguished experts, including geologists, meteorologists, physical scientists, engineers, medical experts, educationist, economists, agricultural experts and sociologists, which would investigate the causes and consequences of the present earthquake as well as other natural disasters that have occurred in Pakistan, during the last two or three decades, but with special focus on the present earthquake.
Such a Task Force is urgently needed to help undertake a realistic, objective and independent assessment of the overall impact of the earthquake, and an evaluation of the past relief efforts, as well as the problems of logistics confronted in its implementation .
The Task Force should also determine the needs and priorities of the rehabilitation programme, both in the medium and long term, along with the mobilization and use of domestic and external resources. Without such an assessment, it is likely that grievous errors of judgment will be made with far-reaching implications for the future.
The temptation to jump into quick fixes at the prompting of vested interests, including the construction and real estate mafias and foreign aid agencies, should be resisted. The Task Force could be given a time frame and be asked to recommend both short-term and long-term solutions to the challenges of disaster management and rehabilitation and reconstruction of the earthquake-affected areas.
It is well-known that Pakistan’s policymakers, past and present, have always shied away from long-term strategies and have heavily relied on ad hocism. No where is this more vividly recognizable than in the area of disaster management, a subject that has hardly ever received any explicit mention in our five year plans, which have themselves been discontinued recently.
In a rather guileless review of “Disaster Management Policies and Systems in Pakistan”, an official report submitted to the World Conference on Disaster Reduction (WCDR), held to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the earthquake in Kobe, Japan, in January, 2005, states:
— the development paradigm in Pakistan has remained oblivious of the preparedness and management of natural calamities.
The rudimentary disaster management machinery that has existed in Pakistan has been primarily geared to flood control. Until 1976, flood control was a provincial subject and was dealt with by the provincial irrigation departments. But the massive floods of 1973 and 1976, resulting in huge losses of human lives, land and property, led to the formation of a federal agency, the Federal Flood Commission in 1977.
For dealing with other emergencies, there is an Emergency Relief Cell, (ERC) which works under the aegis of the Cabinet Division and a National Crisis Management Cell (NCMC) that works under the Ministry of Interior. Along with the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD), these agencies form a rather loose and largely toothless nucleus of Pakistan’s disaster management apparatus.
It has been reported that the Government is considering the establishment of a high-powered, state-of-the-art disaster management agency under civilian auspices. However, these plans have been supplanted by the President’s appointment of two senior army generals to look after the relief and rehabilitation tasks related to the earthquake. There are obvious shortcomings in the decision-making structure, as well as in the time-horizon envisaged for disaster management, with the army clearly leaning in the direction of a quick fix.
The most serious flaw in the arrangements for dealing with both short-term and long-term measures for relief and rehabilitation of the earthquake victims is that they are over-centralised , with the army playing an overarching role. Of course, the army has a critical role in rescue efforts and logistical support, but there are clearly areas in which it has no comparative advantage . There is a need for a consultative mechanism through which the scores of NGOs and citizens’ groups or their representatives can participate in formulating and implementing the overall strategy and the specific tactics for different affected areas and victims of the earthquake.
In particular, there is no attempt by the government or even the NGOs to involve in the relief work the victims or their relatives who live and work in the various urban centres, especially the Islamabad, Rawalpindi region.
Thousands of people from the Mansehra and Muzzafarabad divisions, where the bulk of the earthquake victims are concentrated, work in Islamabad-Rawalpindi area as low grade Government employees, gardeners, domestic servants, artisans or in other low-income occupations and are often the sole or the main income-earners in their household. They send a large part of their income to support their families and would have to bear much of the losses inflicted by the earthquake.
Most of them come from far-flung localities which relief agencies have great difficulty accessing and where the only relief goods that have so far reached have been through these non-residents who rushed home, soon after they heard that their villages had been ravaged by the earthquake. These people could be the best and most reliable conduit for channelling aid to these areas.
Unfortunately, there has been no attempt to use this human resource, presumably because of their low status in society. It is a sad reflection on the elitist and paternalistic nature of our relief and poverty alleviation programs that no government agency or NGO has tried to mobilize and tap this invaluable resource for delivering relief aid.
Much attention has been paid to the likely impact of the earthquake on the economy’s prospects. However, for a large economy like Pakistan, the short-run macroeconomic shock will not be difficult to absorb. Indeed, it may provide some stimulus to the economy if the reconstruction work gets under way and relief work continues apace. The main economic brunt of the earthquake will be borne by the survivors and their relatives.
The important concern at this stage should not be to ensure a high growth rate, but to ascertain that the past mistakes in our development strategy, which resulted in high incidence of poverty and increase in income inequality, along with poor human development, are avoided.
The cliché of turning the tragedy into opportunity has been repeatedly used in the context of the October eight earthquake. For this, both the rulers and the elites need to take a deep introspection. It is time to be humble and modest and to realize the ephemeral quality and wastefulness of the luxurious life-style that our nation has chosen to adopt, compared to other South Asian countries.
One of the most pressing needs is to examine the wasteful and risky investment that is being made in the real estate sector, epitomized by the tragic collapse of Margalla towers in Islamabad, While the real estate barons of the country flourish through their collusion with bureaucracy and other elites, the poor remain shelterless or live under thatched roof or in buildings or settlements vulnerable to natural disaster, lack of sanitation and disease.
The collapse of school and hospital buildings in the earthquake affected areas in which thousands of students, doctors and patients perished also highlights the unethical practices of the building contractors and the deliberate lack of oversight by the authorities in ensuring the adequacy and implementation of building codes.
One hopes that the 8th October tragedy will not provide more of this kind of opportunity in the guise of reconstruction. If that happens, the real estate boom will balloon further, before it bursts.
The real opportunity lies in being jolted to realize that “business as usual ”and “more of the same” attitude of our rulers will have to be given up and a serious search for sustainable development alternatives should begin, to turn a new leaf in our history.
The single most important lesson of the October eight tragedy is that we need to adopt a more sustainable and inclusive paradigm of development which focuses not on growth per se but on human development, social protection and the creation of social capital to cope with not only the present tragedy, but also with the more pervasive tragedies that the poor, the excluded and the weak suffer on a daily basis.
THE grim reality of the colossal loss of lives and massive destruction of the habitat caused by the October eight earthquake is beginning to sink into the national consciousness.
