After the deluge, it's us
The bustle's gone out of Tharangambadi. The once-prosperous Dutch-controlled port was before last year's tsunami a contented fishing village -- albeit a pretty big one. Then it was ravaged. If you walk its street today, you will see the signs of devastation -- the pile of historical rubble -- in your face. But if you want to see through the lens of television -- screaming victim, victim -- sorry, you need a new pair of glasses. The bustle's still there -- the morning fish market, the children in the street wanting to be photographed and the old man selling odds and ends in a shop financed by an ngo. They're all there, must we say it, because they survived -- in spite of, most of the time.
A year on, Tamil Nadu, the state hit hardest by the tsunami, is still struggling to put rehabilitation programmes on a secure footing. The magnitude of the task is not in question, but the progress made by the government is. The tsunami destroyed or damaged about 130,000 houses -- about 9 lakh people were affected.
In March 2005, the state government announced a plan to reconstruct all the 130,000 houses. But a note released in November had a revised target of 92,000 houses in two phases: 45,000 by March 2006; and the rest by September 2006.To meet its target, it pushed the programme hard, especially because an earlier target for building a significant number by the year-end -- the first anniversary -- was washed out by the floods and cyclones that hit Tamil Nadu in October and November. But this unseemly haste -- according to workers on the ground, driven partly by the fact that assembly elections are due in the state in 2006 -- made the government ignore factors that damaged the rehabilitation plan.
"Poor selection of land is certainly one of the problems," says Sandeep Virmani, of the Bhuj-based Honnarshala Foundation, who is coordinating with a number of ngo s working on the ground. The recent floods exposed this brutally, by flooding many houses that had been built in low-lying areas. The government has now gone into a damage-control mode by trying to fill up these areas to raise their level. But this plan too is fraught with danger. "This will only add to the problems. The low-lying areas may be drainage channels, natural or otherwise, considering that the sea is so close," says Prashant Hadeo, an ecological planner with Auroville, in Pondicherry. "Blocking these channels will mean flooding neighbouring areas."
Criticism has also been directed at the lack of imagination in designing the houses and laying out the settlements, but there are more fundamental concerns about the suitability of the materials being used to make them. "Most newly built houses are made of reinforced concrete. If one is going to have concrete houses in coastal areas, then the cement and steel should be of high grade," says K S Jagdish, emeritus professor, department of civil engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He says that the salt in the air could corrode them. Jagdish says brick houses would have been more suitable.
A large number of the problems could have been avoided had there been a genuine attempt to involve beneficiaries, following the Bhuj model, in which they were given the responsibility of rebuilding their houses. This ensured that the houses were more habitable and of better quality. Indonesia and Thailand followed this model, as did Jammu and Kashmir after last year's earthquake. But, as Virmani observes, Tamil Nadu did not (see box: Fishing villages redefined).
But there have been some bouquets for the government. Annie George, coordinator of ngo Coordination and Resource Committee (ncrc) from Nagapattinam, thinks that the government is doing a balanced job, given the constraints. "It is not that they aren't amenable to suggestions. For instance, many fishing hamlets in Nagapattinam district did not like sites acquired for relocation. The authorities were ready to change them," she says. Also, the government relented on coastal regulation zone (crz) rules, allowing rebuilding of houses within 500 metres of the high-tide line, after ngos convinced it that fisherfolk needed to live closer to the sea.
The government has, to be fair, tried to decentralise work by encouraging the involvement of ngos -- they are slated to build in excess of 40,000 houses -- just laying down the basic guidelines. Houses have to be disaster-proof, occupy at least 28-30 square metres and be at least 200 metres from the high-tide line. The government is giving 121.45 square metres in rural areas and 60.70 square metres in urban areas. But involving ngos has not worked wonders. In most cases, they entrust work to contractors, defeating the purpose of decentralisation.
But some ngos have scripted success stories. The South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies (siffs), which is building 1,050 houses in Tharangambadi in Nagapattinam district, has ensured the participation of houseowners. It convinced the government to let it select sites and then made certain that people had the choice of where to relocate, if at all.
Rebuilding lives. That's an even tougher call than rebuilding houses. A lack of planning and coordination has bedevilled efforts at restoring livelihoods both on the part of the government and ngo s -- but unexpected fallouts have given people the space to negotiate changes.
Thaddeus Koriya of ncrc points out that there has been an exponential growth in the number of boats in Nagapattinam, district, which was worst hit. The same is true of the two other badly-hit districts -- Cuddalore and Kanyakumari. This is not good news -- fish catches have already been dwindling and more boats mean more intensive fishing and smaller catches per boat. A state fisheries department document, 'Endeavour and Achievements, 2002-2003', shows marine fish catches in Nagapattinam and Kanyakumari fell from 70,212 tonnes and 46,440 tonnes respectively in 1997-98 to 43,974 and 19,643 tonnes in 2002-2003. "Replacing the fishing fleet to the pre-tsunami levels, without matching fisheries resource availability to fishing capacity, may prove may prove to be counter-productive in the long run," Sebastian Mathew of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers had warned soon after the tsunami struck.
It's not just numbers. The balance between mechanised trawlers, small fibreglass boats and traditional catamarans has altered drastically. With the explosion in the number of fibreglass boats catamarans are going out of business. It's a good thing that neither the government or ngos are distributing free trawlers -- that would have completely destroyed the balance. Given that small fishermen operate on really small margins, they could have been all but wiped out. Look at these figures. Lakshmanan, a fisherman from Sonankuppam village in Cuddalore, says a fibreglass boat with a crew of five gets Rs 500 to Rs 800 a day. That means a crew member gets Rs 50 to 100 a day after the owner keeps operational costs and his share.
That's just one part of the story. The other is that the traditional occupational arrangements in the fishing community are being badly disarranged. The balance between labour and boats is now heavily tilted -- too many boats, too few people.
Moreover, the attempt by ngos to force equity into the scene backfired because they did not know how the fishing operation worked. Earlier, the crew members of a fishing boat would share the day's proceeds after deducting operational expenses. In the new situation, where boats have been given to groups, fishermen are likely to revert to old arrangements -- sell their shares to one member and resume business.
But if this sounds like a completely unredeemed scenario, there's a bright side. A lot of fishermen are happy, even if their boats are at the moment being put to completely non-marine uses. The boats can be a valuable fallback option for fisherfolk -- they could always sell them. "I wouldn't be surprised if most of these boats landed up on the Orissa and Andhra Pradesh coasts," says Anthony Benchilas of ncrc.
The way livelihood restoration has gone about has brought about a social churning of sorts. The fishing community has always been known to keep to itself and manage its own affairs. Caste panchayat s are very powerful. But with ngos coming in with their largesse, power is a commodity that can be negotiated -- in many places those with better bargaining skills have usurped the position of the old panchayats. In Akkarapettai and Nambiar Nagar in Nagapattinam, crew formed unions to negotiate with ngos. In Tharangambadi, a panchayat gave way to a new one because it couldn't drive a hard enough bargain.
Bargaining skills were important. Despite an agreement between the government and ngo s that those who got boats wouldn't get compensation, some got both. But some people got nothing. Most people in ancillary trades -- fish vendors, merchants, small ice-plant owners -- received little. A large population of dalit s engaged in inland fishing, pearl and algae collection and ornamental shell-making were even worse off. Farmers are being compensated, but the landless are not.
But despite everything, despite the sometimes eerie stillness, most people have picked up the threads of their lives.
The tsunami caused extensive damage in fragile coastal ecological niches:mangrove forests, coral reefs, sand dunes supporting unique vegetation were swept away. Soon, investigation and research turned its attention to these phenomena.
But these attempts were, unfortunately, sporadic attempts at engaging with the post-tsunami scenario. The government made no concerted attempt at harnessing its not inconsiderable scientific arsenal for planning the rehabilitation drive. One reason was that most of the institutions that were working on tsunami-related were central government institutions, while rehabilitation was the state government's patch. Another reason was lack of initiative. In some places, individual administrators made the effort -- as in Nagapattinam, where Jagdish's expertise was drafted.
V Vivekanandan, chief executive of siffs, noted this disconnect. "It is really sad that the scientific institutions in the country had very little role in the rebuilding process," he told Down To Earth. Though several scientists individually came forward offering technical expertise, there wasn't any plan either on the part of the state or the centre to get them involved constructively.
Institutions like the Chennai-based National Institute of Ocean Technology and various Indian Space Research Organisation research centres working in areas like remote sensing could have provided ngos working in coastal areas with contour maps. This would have improved the planning of new settlements. The same goes for agriculture. The country has invested so much in agricultural research. But the contribution of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in salvaging salt-affected agricultural fields was non-existent, Vivekanandan bemoans.
Vivekanadan's grouse is that students from the network of engineering colleges and polytechnics in the state were not involved in rehabilitation work, which could have given them invaluable experience and contributed to creating a nucleus of engineers and scientists who could later have contributed in similar situations. An opportunity was lost, Vivekanandan said. "All these show how disconnected our scientific community is when it comes to dealing with real-crisis situations."
It has to be noted, however, that though the scientific establishment did not contribute to reconstruction, it generated a lot of research on tsunami-related phenomenon.
Post-disaster rehabilitation programmes have never got the greatest of presses in this country. In recent times, the Latur earthquake and the supercyclone in Orissa were followed by shambolic attempts to provide relief. Things started to change with the reconstruction paradigm in Bhuj, after the Gujarat earthquake of 2001.
When India was hit by the tsunami, it was in uncharted territory. The last one had occurred in 1945 and even general knowledge, leave aside scientific research, was hard to come by. The scientific establishment reacted fast to set in place warning systems.