The Big Story: Windbag state

In Kerala, hit by cyclone Ockhi, fishermen have stopped waiting for the state government and Coast Guard to help them. Communities banded together and launched their own search parties to look for missing neighbours at sea. A week after the tragedy, fishing communities and the government do not even agree on the number of people missing or dead: the former believe that the authorities are vastly underestimating the figure.

Ockhi hit the coast of Tamil Nadu and Kerala on November 30. As of Tuesday, the storm had killed 39 Indians, highlighting the lack of preparation in the country’s response to natural disasters.

Given India’s subcontinental size, the country experiences frequent calamities. Since one-third of the country’s population lives in coastal areas, oceanic disasters are common. Yet, it took the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 for state governments and the Centre to wake up the need for a mechanism as basic as early warning systems. It was only after 2004 that the National Disaster Management Authority was set up.

Yet, even after this, progress was slow. In 2013, for example, Uttarakhand experienced flooding and landslides caused by a severe cloudburst. Though cloudburst had been predicted by the Indian Meteorological Department, the Uttarakhand government simply ignored the warning leading to the deaths of nearly 6,000 people. Even after the calamity hit, there was little coordination between the state government and Central bodies such as the Indian Army and the National Disasater Management Authority. In 2017, large parts of Bihar saw flooding – a regular occurrence during the monsoons. Yet, despite the clockwork timing of the flooding, Bihar was unprepared, resulting in the loss of more than 500 lives.

Things are not all bleak, however. In 2013, as Cyclone Phailin threatened Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, the authorities evacuated the threat areas before the storm could hit. The operation moved out 1.2 million people. In 1999, a cyclone in the same region had killed 10,000 people. In 2013, 21 people died.

Phailin shows that India can swing into action. It also proves that with preparedness, lives need not be lost to nature. Yet, till now, such action has been the exception, not the norm. In the case of Ockhi, for example, a tug of war has broken out between Kerala state government and the Indian Meteorological Department over whether a warning was issued on time. Even worse, India’s laws, copied unthinkingly from international norms, make it illegal for small fishing vessels to carry communication equipment that could save lives in such a situation. This state of affairs with respect to disaster management will have to change.

The Big Scroll

Cyclone Ockhi tragedy: Angered by Kerala’s inaction, fisherpeople launch their own search squads, reports TA Ameerudheen.

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Punditry

  • The events of December 6, 1992 assaulted both secularism and Hinduism. The consequences are still to play out fully, writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express.
  • High land costs deter builders from taking up low-income housing projects. But vacant government land can be put to use, proposes Radhika Merwin in the Hindu Business Line.
  • The Goods and Services Tax opens up a lot of data for policymaking, contends the Chief Statistician of India TCA Anant in an interview to Vikas Dhoot and TCA Sharad Raghavan in the Hindu.

Giggle

Don’t Miss

Centre to Finance Commission: Reward states for our pet schemes (and punish them for theirs). Nitin Sethi reports on how Centre-state fiscal relations are being defined today:

“It is for such reasons critics say the government has not gone far enough in revamping Centre-state fiscal relations. ‘The Fourteenth Finance Commission recommended setting up a new institutional mechanism to act as a platform for identifying specific grants by the Union to states and help design schemes with appropriate flexibility,’ said Yamini Aiyar, president and chief executive of the Centre for Policy Studies. ‘But that did not happen. Instead, states have become dependent on the finance ministry to decide allocations for schemes. The finance ministry’s rightful role is to keep a check on funding and that is what it’s doing. What we have now is the same schemes running without real changes but with curtailed funds for some.’”