How India organised its relief work in Nepal

Unlike the Uttarakhand floods of 2013, the operation was carried out with clockwork precision in the Himalayan state

On April 25, a little before noon, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale hit Nepal and adjoining Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Within no time, it was clear that an unprecedented natural calamity had visited the Himalayan state. Old buildings crumbled, and reports of landslides and avalanches started pouring in - there was devastation all around.

At 3 pm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called a meeting of his senior ministers and tried reaching out to his Nepalese counterpart, Sushil Koirala, who was returning home from a foreign visit. Modi, by then, had spoken to Ram Baran Yadav, president of Nepal, and had decided to help the country.

Within an hour of Modi's meeting, the Indian Air Force got into action. A C-130 J Super Hercules aircraft flew 45 personnel from the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) located at Ghaziabad on the outskirts of Delhi and landed at the Kathmandu airport around 5:30 pm. This team of rescuers was followed by another six on the same day and nine more in the subsequent days.

"At the airport we were received by the Indian Ambassador who briefed us about the situation and told us about the dos and don'ts," says P K Srivastav, the commander of the NDRF teams, who reached Kathmandu at around 7 pm.

Srivastav, along with his team of 1,145 personnel, looks after an area of 250,000 square km in Uttar Pradesh, Uttrakhand, Delhi and Haryana in case of any manmade or natural disaster. Though he had taken part in several rescue operations in the past, Srivastav says he had never seen such faultless movement of personnel as on that day.

"This operation was even bigger than during the Uttarakhand deluge in June 2013. At that time we had faced a lot of difficulties getting the aircraft on time. Ever since the Modi government took over a year ago, we find aircraft are readily available to us," he adds.

At the Kathmandu airport, the Nepalese army took the NDRF teams directly to the affected areas in the capital city. The teams were pressed into service right away. They worked through the night and rescued six people alive from the rubble. Their food and accommodation were arranged later.

Back in India, a nodal desk was set up in the cabinet secretariat for the entire search, relief and rescue operations in Nepal. The external affairs ministry was entrusted with the responsibility of coordinating efforts outside India, while the home ministry was asked to work with all the government departments, ministries and non-profit agencies within India.

Joining forces
On the evening of the tragedy, Army chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag, a Gorkha Rifles officer, established contact with his counterpart in Nepal, General Gaurav Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, and offered to send two senior Gorkha officers to Nepal along with people from medical and engineers corps. Five helicopters from the Army's aviation wing were also dispatched under the overall command of Major General J S Sandhu.

"India and Nepal share a unique relationship. General Suhag is the honorary chief of the Nepal Army, and General Rana is the honorary chief of the Indian Army. Besides we have 125,000 ex-servicemen in Nepal and around 38,000 serving Gorkhas in the force," says Indian army spokesperson Col Rohan Anand.

In Nepal, work for every Indian contingent was cut out. While the NDRF teams mostly worked in and around Kathmandu, clearing the debris, the army reached the far flung areas to rescue people and established makeshift hospitals and inhabitations. The aviation wing set up its base in Pokhra, as the Kathmandu airport had got overcrowded. The army choppers had taken around 747 sorties till May 10.

The Indian Air Force positioned six medium-range helicopters at Kathmandu and two at Pokhra. Its role was to bring relief material and evacuate Nepalese and stranded foreign nationals from the remote locations. Till May 5, the Air Force had undertaken 569 sorties and ferried 746 tonnes of relief material. It also evacuated 2,012 persons and recovered 619 bodies.

"It was one of the biggest humanitarian relief operations undertaken by the Indian government on foreign soil. Our teams worked according to the requirement of the Nepal army which was leading the humanitarian operations," says Sithansu Kar, defence ministry spokesperson.

Kar says besides the pivotal role of the armed forces and NDRF personnel in Nepal, social media played a huge role in reaching out to those areas where relief was yet to reach. Kar deployed a team of three photographers who would send him pictures daily from Nepal through the returning Air Force flights. "I would tweet these pictures and it made a huge impact. I used to get immediate messages from the families of those who were stranded in the valley and were still out of reach," he says.

Delhi to Kathmandu
In Delhi, Modi and his senior cabinet ministers reviewed the Nepal situation daily for the first three days. National Security Advisor Ajit Doval was sent to see the situation on the ground. The foreign secretary, defence secretary and home secretary were tasked with briefing the media daily about the developments in Nepal.

"During one such meeting, it was decided to open the road and rail network to Nepal as the aid through air was proving expensive. Ferrying a water bottle was costing the exchequer five times its cost price," says a government official directly involved in the relief and coordination operation. Thus, senior officers were deployed at the Old Delhi Railway Station. The trains carried material to Raxual in Bihar from where it was loaded on trucks and sent to Nepal.

In the meantime, the NDRF teams managed to pull out more people alive. Of the 16 people rescued in the worst affected parts of Kathmandu, the so-called ground zero, 11 lives were saved by the Indian teams.

"This was despite 50 teams from 32 nations working side by side with us on the ground. These teams included those from the US and the UK and had much better equipment then us. Countries likes Oman and Sweden had come prepared with their land cruisers, Hummers and all-terrain vehicles. They directly drove in their vehicles to the affected sites," Srivastav says.

He recalls an incident where Indian troops had pulled out the corpse of a Nepalese army officer who had died after a hotel collapsed in Gongabu. "The Chinese had failed as the site had become perilously unstable. But our boys did the job despite repetitive aftershocks and intermittent rains making it more difficult," he says.

A strategic move?
Did the Modi government swing into action to gain a strategic advantage? Many observers say, and some Nepalese leaders admit, public opinion in that country has swung in favour of India after Modi came to power. "The Modi government will get the credit for sure because he is in power. But India would and should have helped Nepal anyway," says Shiv Shankar Mukherjee, former Indian ambassador to Nepal. "The Nepalese people are grateful to India and it is in India's interest to ensure the well-being of its neighbour country."

The Indian contingents won praise from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and various governments, but it could not avoid some negative publicity. A campaign was launched on social media, #GoHomeIndianMedia. The large Indian electronic media contingent was accused of being "insensitive" and "jingoistic" while covering the calamity. That took some shine off the work the Indian government had done.

"This was mainly the fault of the Indian media and some voluntary organisations which went to Nepal to help. They tried to undermine the authority of the Nepalese army, which is revered in the Himalayan valley, and rubbed the government authorities the wrong way. Already some sections of Nepal criticise India for interfering in their domestic issues," says a home ministry official who was on the ground.

Perhaps this could be the reason India didn't show much enthusiasm when the earthquake hit the country again on May 12. Modi, instead of reaching out to Koirala, waited for his phone call for help.

Clarification

An earlier version of the article had referred to Nepal as a Himalayan kingdom. The error, which has since been rectified, is regretted