THE overwhelming public response to the October 8, 2005 earthquake made it different from the other calamities in Pakistan’s history. The prompt mobilisation of the people, who rushed to the aid of their brethren in need from all parts of the globe in the wake of the disaster, made every Pakistani proud. For once, Pakistanis became one and it looked as if all the affected people would be rehabilitated soon. It seemed also that the nation would draw appropriate lessons from the tragedy in which at least 73,000 people perished and more than 3 million became homeless.

Two years on, it’s plain that the people who thought that things would look up — for the nation in general and the northern areas in particular — were wrong. It’s clear that in a country like ours, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Media reports suggest that less than half the houses destroyed in the calamity have been rebuilt so far. There are several reasons for this. For one, the affected people are strapped for funds.

Many of them have yet to get the full compensation amount of Rs175,000 they were supposed to get in four instalments. (More than 90 per cent of them have yet to get the fourth instalment).

Nobody expected the affected people to fully fund the reconstruction of their destroyed houses with the help of this rather small amount. But unscrupulous government functionaries — by demanding bribes, etc — erected hurdles even in the payment of this small amount, thereby showing how to turn a tragedy into an opportunity.

Another reason for the slow pace of reconstruction work are the disputes over the master plans of the earthquake-hit cities (particularly that of Muzaffarabad) and the litigation over the use of land in Bakryal, which is supposed to be the site of the New Balakot City. These would have been resolved by now had the authorities been as efficient as they claim to be.

The pace of the reconstruction work is one issue but the quality of it is another far more important one. On the quality front, too, the government functionaries have failed the people miserably, with less than 15 per cent of the newly-built buildings being stated to be earthquake-resistant. Stated differently, there has been only a small improvement in the way buildings are built in the earthquake-prone areas of the NWFP and Azad Kashmir, despite the loss of thousands of lives in the Oct 8 quake.

There are several reasons for this. One is obviously the shortage of funds, especially among the common people. The other is the failure of the authorities to make people opt for earthquake-resistant housing units, with the result that buildings are being built in almost the same way as before the biggest calamity in the country’s history.

To be fair to the authorities, they did make some efforts to link the payment of the compensation amount with the quality of reconstruction work. When this rather ill-advised strategy failed, however, they did not revisit and review it. What’s more, they did not make much effort to educate the masses about the pitfalls of building concrete structures.

The net result is that the buildings being built today in the earthquake-prone areas of the country are almost as vulnerable to tremors as they were on Oct 8, 2005. This only means that a couple of years down the line, when all the buildings destroyed in the Oct 8 calamity have been rebuilt, the people of the northern areas would not be any safer than they were before the great tragedy.

The authorities, as well as the media people, seem to forget that earthquakes don’t kill people. The inadequately constructed buildings do. The media organisations’ failure to highlight this point and the authorities’ failure to realise this on their own is what pains one the most.

The writer is author of “Oct 8 Earthquake: Portraits of Grief and Hope”