Cyclone Phailin: How India Averted The Catastrophe
By IndiaTimes | October 16, 2013, 10:10 am IST
Bhubaneswar: As the fiercest storm to hit India this century barrelled across the Bay of Bengal on Saturday, a local mandarin frantically worked the phones from his hot and humid office, leading the charge in an operation to move nearly a million people to safety. “We were telling people: ‘Look, you have to choose between death and life’,” said Taradatt, who heads the Revenue and Disaster Management Department in Odisha. “Those who were not willing (to be evacuated), I was telling the local official to use force, because the rules permit that.”
When Cyclone Phailin slammed into Odisha and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh with winds gusting at more than 200 kmph (125 mph), India was braced for the worst. A monster storm that hit the very same region 14 years ago had killed 10,000 people. But this time, the death toll was astonishingly low, at the latest count just 21.
It was a rare moment of relief in this disaster-prone country, one that has already been hailed as a triumph of official heroism and defies the Indian bureaucracy’s reputation for bungling and indecision. “It’s nothing short of a miracle that so many lives were spared. We were expecting the worst, but it just shows that all the time and investment put into preparing for such disasters by the authorities, civil society organisations and communities has paid off,” said Devendra Tak from Save the Children, the international NGO.
Disasters that claim thousands of lives are still almost routine in India, however. More than 5,000 people died in June when flash floods hit a Himalayan state, and even on Sunday – as many marvelled at the low death toll from the cyclone – more than 100 devotees were killed in a stampede at a Hindu temple.
Empowering local officials
Along with Taradatt, who just uses one name, junior officials also chipped in. As the storm closed in on Odisha’s coastal district of Ganjam last Saturday, the seniormost local civil servant Krishan Kumar was exhausted.
For the past three nights he hadn’t slept, working without a break to set up hundreds of temporary shelters in schools and temples and persuade villagers to abandon ramshackle dwellings. “There was a lot of resistance to begin with,” said 37-year-old Kumar. “The weather was very good, the sun was shining and to convince people was not an easy job. We had to move from village to village explaining what could happen.”
With a couple of hours to go before the storm made landfall, some 350,000 people living up to 10 km (6 miles) from the shoreline were safely sheltered for the night. Across the two eastern states, more than 1 million people were evacuated from their homes.
Civil servants like Kumar are some of India’s best and brightest, but they have long been hamstrung by a bureaucracy that discourages individuals from taking decisions on their own. Kumar said he knew lives depended on breaking with that culture. “That’s the first thing I asked, that I be completely authorised to take decisions at my own level,” said Kumar, who received an award from the country’s prime minister five years ago for resettling victims of bloody clashes between Hindu tribes and Christians in another district. Kumar, in turn, last week empowered officials across Ganjam to act as they saw fit, including ordering village shops to remain open to prevent hoarding of food and emergency supplies.
When Cyclone Phailin slammed into Odisha and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh with winds gusting at more than 200 kmph (125 mph), India was braced for the worst. A monster storm that hit the very same region 14 years ago had killed 10,000 people. But this time, the death toll was astonishingly low, at the latest count just 21.
It was a rare moment of relief in this disaster-prone country, one that has already been hailed as a triumph of official heroism and defies the Indian bureaucracy’s reputation for bungling and indecision. “It’s nothing short of a miracle that so many lives were spared. We were expecting the worst, but it just shows that all the time and investment put into preparing for such disasters by the authorities, civil society organisations and communities has paid off,” said Devendra Tak from Save the Children, the international NGO.
Disasters that claim thousands of lives are still almost routine in India, however. More than 5,000 people died in June when flash floods hit a Himalayan state, and even on Sunday – as many marvelled at the low death toll from the cyclone – more than 100 devotees were killed in a stampede at a Hindu temple.
Empowering local officials
Along with Taradatt, who just uses one name, junior officials also chipped in. As the storm closed in on Odisha’s coastal district of Ganjam last Saturday, the seniormost local civil servant Krishan Kumar was exhausted.
For the past three nights he hadn’t slept, working without a break to set up hundreds of temporary shelters in schools and temples and persuade villagers to abandon ramshackle dwellings. “There was a lot of resistance to begin with,” said 37-year-old Kumar. “The weather was very good, the sun was shining and to convince people was not an easy job. We had to move from village to village explaining what could happen.”
With a couple of hours to go before the storm made landfall, some 350,000 people living up to 10 km (6 miles) from the shoreline were safely sheltered for the night. Across the two eastern states, more than 1 million people were evacuated from their homes.
Civil servants like Kumar are some of India’s best and brightest, but they have long been hamstrung by a bureaucracy that discourages individuals from taking decisions on their own. Kumar said he knew lives depended on breaking with that culture. “That’s the first thing I asked, that I be completely authorised to take decisions at my own level,” said Kumar, who received an award from the country’s prime minister five years ago for resettling victims of bloody clashes between Hindu tribes and Christians in another district. Kumar, in turn, last week empowered officials across Ganjam to act as they saw fit, including ordering village shops to remain open to prevent hoarding of food and emergency supplies.
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