Rehabilitation will take more than blankets — and inefficiency in the system isn’t helping.
When the floors beneath our feet shook on Monday, the rush to leave our buildings was partially spurred from immediate concern for our lives, but also, in part, from memories. In 2005, when the earthquake ravaged the country and destroyed areas, homes and lives that are still adjusting 10 years on, few who felt the tremors could have imagined the scale of the damage they would bring. Ten years later, the country has a Disaster Management Authority operating on three levels – national, provincial and district. There is a National Plan, raised and passed by our country’s legislature and an established mechanism that is, in the words of Punjab DMA Director Ali Qamar, “more than capable of handling” such disasters.
“Each province has its own unique problems, which its own provincial and district DMA gives special focus to”, he explained.
“And while Punjab is more prone to floods, places like KP, especially the hilly areas, are more prone to disasters like earthquakes. We (Punjab) have been very effective in handling the seasonal floods, because Punjab is more prone to them. We know this and use this information. I mean, I can’t stop the rain from coming. I can’t control the water. But we can alert the people – and we have. We’ve been using an early warning system to evacuate people before floods can hit their areas –and it’s been very effective. In fact, the only instances of loss of life in the 2014 seasonal floods were people who had voluntarily gone to the banks – they were on picnics and such. And, well, it’s not like we can stop the water from coming, but besides those, we saved many lives and there was virtually no loss of property. And each DMA should be capable of handling its own disasters accordingly.”
Brave words. And ones that would have given one hope, had not the country still been in recovery from the last earthquake – 10 years ago. But it is still “adjusting”, questions about the distribution of the received foreign aid are still being raised and the renovation and rehabilitation of areas affected by the 2005 quake are still a “work in progress”. When the ground beneath our feet started shaking ten years later, and we raced out of our homes and offices and schools, one would think that, once the proverbial – and literal – dust had settled, that very mechanism Qamar lauded would kick in to place and would make quick work of analysing, assessing and responding to the situation.
And yet criticism abounds; everything from the government’s inability to re-establish communication in the most affected areas, to the official visits to the affected areas, to the prime minister’s relief package itself have come under heavy fire.
‘Each province has its own unique problems, which its own provincial and district DMA gives special focus to’
“That’s not even enough to build a room, let alone a complete house,” said Fazal Khaliq firmly. “They need to assess the situation first; blindly announcing packages is of no use. And as for the verification committee they’ve made, first we need to ask – whose committee? Is it made of elected consulates – who are of no use in this regard – or experts; engineers, etc.; who actually know what to do, and how much is needed to get it done?”
I spoke to the writer, who is from Swat, to get a better understanding of the on ground situation, and understand just how effective the government’s efforts had been.
“Let’s be clear: there are no efforts,” he started. “The worst hit areas aren’t even accessible yet, how are they going to get relief when they can’t even get in contact? What’s happening at the time is that the district government has made teams, and right now they’re going door to door and conducting surveys. In fact the relief efforts that should have happened haven’t even started. And that’s just the flat land – they haven’t even gotten to the hilly areas yet, and those are the worst hit.”
Meanwhile, the death toll from the 7.5 magnitude earthquake has soared to 268 – with the most affected areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. According to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), 1,864 people were injured while 13,771 houses were damaged in the quake.
KP Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) on Thursday said that the quake claimed at least 221 lives while not less than 12,000 houses bore complete or partial damages in the province. And while everyone from the prime minister to Mr Qamar, the PDMA director I spoke to, claimed the nation didn’t need foreign assistance. KP Senior Minister Inayatullah Khan said that the provincial government would welcome “immediate assistance of the world community and international relief agencies.” Even if the federal government didn’t think the aid was needed, the provincial government apparently thought otherwise.
“They’re right,” said Raoof Hasan, a prominent analyst and executive director of the Islamabad-based Regional Peace Institute.
“The first line of defence — the first line from where this relief actually comes is the local leadership – and that, no one has attended to. The national disaster management authorities are not fully functional even now. It took five years for the government to actually pass the act. And they still are not fully empowered – which unfortunately holds true for other institutions as well. They operate directly under the authority of the prime minister, and that means that they will never be empowered, independent of the executive — and that is the requirement in all democracies”.
After the passage of ten years, the provincial disaster management authority is not even functional yet. So there was no immediate response.
They have no storage of stuff like tents and blankets and food items. They should be fully provisioned. It’s late October and it’s very cold in the areas where this happened – the people there will need food items, tents and blankets, and these things were not immediately available. The PDMA had to raise an acquisition to get these.”
When questioned, Qamar denied this. “We have state of the art storage facilities,” he said. “We wouldn’t have been able to offer relief efforts if we didn’t.”
Qamar went on to say that the Punjab PDMA had sent at least 10,000 tents among other items to the affected areas. He defended the PDMA against accusations of lack of preparation and inefficiency as speculation. When I pointed out that the PDMA was criticised for being more “reactionary” than “prepared”, he argued that the PDMA was more than capable of tackling this and any situation. But Mr Khaliq told a different story.
He said that the government’s announcements were just that – announcements – and that any reconstruction in the area was akin to a large scale DIY project.
“There were landslides and they’ve only just managed to make travelling by road possible for one or two places. The people here, whose homes have been destroyed and who have no shelter – their things are ruined and they’ve got no help. So they’re getting by on self help. They’re rebuilding their own homes and buildings.”
This earthquake and its aftermath has also raised other questions. Specifically: how a passage of 10 years is still too little time for Pakistan to learn how to establish and maintain a working disaster management system, or how to deal with disasters and crisis in an effective way. There is no training at an organisational or even a community level, in how to deal with crisis situations. Unlike in the shows we eagerly wait to stream every week, here there are no mandatory fire drills in schools, no state run seminars on how to evacuate during earthquakes or floods or other disasters. When I commented on this sad fact, Khaliq agreed:
“This is something that’s so important – this is something people all over the world know about. And there, training in dealing with disaster management is very effective”, he said.
“When the earthquake came, I went to the hospital near my home. It’s the biggest hospital in the area. And once you got there, no one; not the doctors, not the medical staff – no one knew how to handle the influx of victims. They were just staring at each other. At least the hospitals should have been equipped with a system to provide relief – because they’re the first ones to address the aftermath of any disaster. And even there, there was no equipment – not even enough doctors. No one knew what to do.”
But surely that can’t be; how is it possible that no organisation or institution – state owned or otherwise – has thought to address the issue of training regarding disaster management? Was there no mechanism in place to educate people? I took these questions to Ali Qamar.
“You need to understand,” he said, “that human instinct is a factor here that is very real. First off, it would be very difficult for a government like KP’s provincial government to organise a mass awareness program. It’s extremely difficult to gather and educate people from these areas – especially since they have their own mindsets and they’re not willing to change. Secondly, no training can beat the spur of the moment panic – and that’s human instinct. It’s natural.”
So what are people to do then? Sit and wait for the next disaster? What about educational institutions – the grass root level, as Hasan called it – why weren’t they providing training to their students? Why aren’t there more drills, more safety seminars there?
‘We need to empower these organisations, we need to institutionalise them. They need to be independent of the control of the centre and provided autonomy’
“Well,” said Qamar, “that falls under the ministry of education – but there is a system. All institutions are sent information and messages regarding the importance of the students’ safety and that’s forwarded to the students as well.”
And how often were such messages dispatched?
“These are yearly messages,” he confirmed.
Raoof Hasan had a simpler – and sobering – answer to the same queries:
“We’re talking about our schools. They don’t even do a good job of educating their students at the grass root level. We’ve got politically motivated teachers who don’t – or can’t – teach and students who aren’t getting a regular education, let alone something extra like disaster management training.”
It was a sobering reality check – but true. As Hasan had pointed out before, the trend of politicising every issue and organisation in this country is a dangerous yet ever present one. The earthquake itself became a media circus as politician after politician descended on the areas as soon as travel could be made possible. “And what,” asked Hasan, “is the use of that? It’s taking attention away from the crisis and those affected, and putting the spotlight on the politicians!”
So what can we do? How can these systems be improved? It all boils down, Hasan said, to the same old story. Authorities are ineffective, organisations remain un-empowered and institutions remain dependent on the centre in a way that leaves them incapable of doing their jobs. It is, as Hasan lamented, “like a cancer”.
“We need to empower these organisations, we need to institutionalise them. They need to be independent of the control of the centre and provided autonomy – enough at least so they can do their jobs!”
