Management of Phailin shows India can get its act right when it wants

The bureaucracy, Army, political leadership all worked together with the objective of minimising loss of life

At least this time, no one is asking where they were when the lights went out. Jaganmohan Reddy, Chandrababu Naidu, Kiran Kumar Reddy: no one is politicising cyclone Phailin, its management and reconstruction in its aftermath.

India has come a long way since 1999, though of course, Phailin was very different from the super cyclone of 1999 that wreaked havoc on the Odisha coast. On that occasion, animals, human beings, trees – everything was uprooted and washed away. Eyewitnesses say for miles there were no trees for birds to alight and soon they began dropping out of the sky, dead. Skeletons of animals and human being were discovered weeks after the cyclone simply because of lack of preparedness on the part of the state government. 50,000 died.

This time, everything was different, which tells you that when India wants to act, it can. Quite unlike the Uttarakhand disaster – when the Chief Minister was planning to go to Switzerland for a holiday as news of the Kedarnath disaster broke and cancelled his plans with some reluctance – Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik decided well in advance that he would not go to Delhi and stayed in Bhubaneshwar to coordinate relief plans.

The district administration worked round the clock to make sure people were evacuated (leading to 21 deaths – every death counts, but compared to 50,000 people who died in 1999...). The hero of the hour was the Met Department, which not just predicted the track of the cyclone but also the intensity, the time it would strike and how soon it would abate (unlike Uttarakhand where the Met Department at the centre started squabbling with the state Met Department about who was more accurate). Also for the first time, it gave the rest of the country a coherant picture of what exactly was happening with the cyclone.

What does the management of Phailin tell us?

That yes, India can!

Communication is the key. Because of 24X7 news on TV, a disaster is now a television serial. Heartless as it may sound, it propels the authorities that be – the bureaucracy, the Army, the political leadership – into acting in a manner that is coordinated and effective, knowing they are in the public eye.

Preparedness matters. This is arguably the first natural disaster where the Natural Disaster Management Authority, an elected government and the centre have worked together forgetting differences, with just one objective in mind – how to minimise loss of life.

Former Prime Minister Chandrashekhar used to say the Indian bureaucracy has many drawbacks but it has proved it can rise to the occasion magnificently when motivated to do so. He used to cite the case of the events in Pakistan before the creation of Bangladesh when hundreds of thousands of refugees just poured into West Bengal fleeing pogroms. 3 million refugees poured into Bengal averaging anything between 15,000 and 40,000 people a day. The old were carried in bedsheets and baskets. For months, because of lack of shelter, people lived in drainpipes in the Salt Lake region of Calcutta. Chandrashekhar used to describe this and say that the only thing that prevented a civil war at the time was the efforts of the bureaucracy which did its best to resettle people, provide them shelter and food and care for them as best as it could.

True, the conditions were still subhuman, but it could have been worse. And while managing Phailin, the bureaucracy also deserves full credit.

Ultimately, it is all about leadership.