The very fact that the earthquake did not damage rich localities or the well constructed houses highlights the truth that the real reason behind the death and destruction is the prevailing poverty and backwardness of our working classes and not the earthquake by itself. It is yet another tragic reminder that our current priorities are all wrong.
Again and again, the people and the civil society rise in a big way to rush relief to the stricken people, but the tragedies are soon forgotten. No lessons of a permanent and lasting nature are learnt and the initial emotional response has never been transformed into required long-term pursuits.
The demolition of government schools, hospitals and administrative buildings over a vast area is once again a tragic proof of how public money is squandered away by unscrupulous contractors and corrupt officials. Do these people sitting in their well constructed houses realize that their corruption had resulted in wiping out an entire generation of children who in spite of their poverty were pursuing their education and were the future hopes of this area? The big question for us is what should be done?
This is basically a question of fixing priorities and direction. The state simply does not have a concept of security of the people. Neither does it feel the need for having one. How conveniently do our present rulers separate the country’s interest from the interests of the people as if the country and the people were two distinct entities detached from one another.
The rulers continue to work on the theory that enriching the rich and empowering the powerful was the solution to national problems as in time the benefits would trickle down to the people. We have waited 57 years. This does not work. Security of the people has to be ensured by the state through direct interventions.
Relief work has badly suffered and thousands of people have lost their lives on account of this erroneous thinking. Instead of directing relief operations to the poorest and the worst effected areas where these were most urgently needed, we gave priority to the seats of administration. Following the trickle down effect doctrine, only the spill-over of relief from these centres are going down to lower tiers. This trickle down of relief is yet to reach many remote areas.
In these days of satellite communications, it should take a small team of dedicated persons less than a couple of hours to accurately map out maximum disaster areas. Breakdown of telephonic links in these areas is no excuse. If there is no response from a point by anybody, then it is clear that severe disaster has hit the place.
Accessibility too is not an un-surmountable hurdle. If there is a will and determination to reach a point, ways and methods can be found. At almost every disaster point, the media teams and relief from NGOs preceded the arrival of government relief teams and official relief material.
Hardly three months back, the Army Aviation has rescued a mountaineer precariously perched on a narrow cliff at an altitude of 6,000 meters. We have been fighting a war for more than a decade on even higher altitudes in temperatures as low as minus 40 C. Landing rescue teams or relief goods at altitudes of 1,500-1,800 meters should be an easy task for Army Aviation. It is all a matter of having your priorities right.
The exorbitant increase in the prices of items badly needed in disaster areas cannot be an act of a few individuals. If the majority of sellers were charging the correct prices, the market could not have shot upwards. The few who in the beginning did not increase the prices soon ran out of stocks. Quite possibly their stocks were lifted by their competitors who saw the opportunity and created shortages. Bus fares, truck transportation charges, medicine prices, and even the prices of shrouds have skyrocketed after the earthquake.
This is the general market trend guided by the sacred law of supply and demand and protected by the believers in market forces and the holy market economy. There are big profits to be made in a crisis situation and the hoarders and profiteers have rushed right ahead. Why should one be ashamed of making huge profits? High profits are the pre-requisites of a robust economy. Ask any believer of the holy market economy.
The great famine of Bengal was not the result of food shortages. It was caused by large scale hoarding and profiteering.
The government, reluctant to violate the economic principles it has been advocating for so long, is watching this scam silently. The state apparatus as a matter of routine can impound hundreds of buses and trucks to bring people to the public meetings addressed by dictators and autocrats. But they cannot enter godowns where essential items have been hoarded and acquire these items under law to save human lives.
The stock market is already rising. High demand for cement, steel, construction material, fuel and other necessary items in disaster areas has to result in substantial increase in profits and therefore, further rise in the stock prices.
Temporarily there would be a drop in production in other areas, because all workers belonging to the disaster areas have rushed home and that has already created a slowdown. However, economic realities and the need to earn more to rebuild the lives of their kith and kin would very soon force them back to where their employments were.
Funds and materials contributed by the citizens and the high aid inflows may more than offset any pressures and demands made on the national and provincial exchequers. Thus, the economic indicators which the elite use to describe economic growth are in no danger of going down. They may go up instead. The budgetary deficits too would remain at a level satisfactory for the international financial institutions. The elite and various non-representative regimes have been enriching themselves and acquiring political stability on man made disasters in neighbouring countries. Now, we have a major natural disaster of our own.
All that may be very well from the point of view of the rulers and the elite. But the people stand destroyed and some homework at least on the conceptual level has to be done in the context of natural disasters with a view to provide security to the people.
It is imperative to be prepared before hand in order to minimize human and material losses as also to develop the capability to respond effectively to a disaster immediately. We have seen that help does come from innumerable sources. We should develop firstly the capacity to immediately mobilize this help and secondly to efficiently coordinate and deploy relief to areas where it is needed most.
The nature of disasters being different in different areas, area specific strategies have to be prepared. These strategies have to be research based so that there are no surprises and the teams dealing with the emergency know beforehand what is to be expected and are fully prepared to deal with it.
Disasters do not take place every day. But they come without any advance warning. Thus small teams of highly trained professionals stationed in disaster prone areas with sufficient quantities of needed machinery, equipment and relief materials with the ability not only to mobilize themselves quickly but also to coordinate immediately and effectively with all other institutions and organizations whose help may be needed, have to be put in place.
It must be remembered that a large bureaucratic set-up would crush under its own weight and would be counter productive. Proper legislation to empower this small and efficient set-up to call upon the resources of any other government/private organization in times of emergency will also have to be passed.
One can only envy and admire the swiftness and high levels of training and efficiency of the foreign rescue teams that are presently operating in the disaster areas. There is no harm in learning from others. We can study how countries like China, Turkey and Japan are tackling these problems and design an outfit according to our specific conditions and requirements. It would be a matter of pride for the people of Pakistan if our disaster relief and rescue teams can also rush to other countries in times of their emergencies.
The tragedy is that in the absence of any housing credits for the working classes, all these houses have been built by the sweet and blood and hard earned earnings of the poor. Most of these shelters have now been razed to ground killing their inhabitants because in the first place these were not properly built. The houses of the rich have adequately withstood the tremors of the earthquake almost everywhere.
In Japan and Northern China earthquakes are almost a daily affair but there are no deaths on account of demolition of houses just because these are properly designed to withstand the shocks and tremors. A National Housing Plan focusing on the needs of the homeless has to be put in place to replace these subhuman dwellings and slums with well planned modern housing projects.
Every other day, we hear of new schemes of luxury housings prepared by foreign consultants. No housing scheme is ever announced for the working classes. They are always described as illegal occupants of government land. This nonsense must stop. Every citizen has equal right to the land that the country has.
It is the duty of the state to ensure that every family is apportioned sufficient land to build a house and no body gets more than his due share. Resources like land, water, air, sunshine are gifts of God and nobody should have a monopoly on these simply because he can pay more and deprive others of their legitimate share.
However, we must return to the basic question of whether we ought to follow a concept of security for the people or the prevailing concepts of enriching the rich and empowering the powerful. I see no problem if a people oriented approach is adopted. I see no solutions if we continue blindly on our present path.