Unparalleled

With the death toll getting close to 100,000, the magnitude of the catastrophe caused by the tsunamis that hit several countries in South Asia on Sunday morning is sinking in.

No natural disaster on this scale has hit the region before, and the scale of the human tragedy is almost immeasurable. Every picture of a parent holding a dead child has to be multiplied thousands of times over, to understand the impact.

Estimates of the economic damage have crossed $13 billion (Rs 57,000 crore). In India, the death toll is now reported to have crossed 12,000. Many more thousands are missing and with reports coming in of the complete submergence of several villages in the Car Nicobar islands, no one has any firm idea of the final death count.

All efforts should naturally be directed to speed up the rescue and rehabilitation work in the affected areas, and to prevent epidemics.

Domestic offers of financial support have poured in from state governments, companies and individuals, and show how the disaster and individual tragedies have touched people's hearts in every corner of the country.

In contrast, the offers of aid from overseas have been so small as to be inconsequential, and indeed could well be ignored""the US stands out for offering Rs 0.44 crore.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who had a tour of some of the tsunami-affected states yesterday, has already declared it a national calamity, but there is reluctance still to acknowledge its impact on the fisc and the need to raise resources for relief work.

The response of the government's crisis management group could have been more prompt (it held its first meeting almost six hours after the Indian Air Force got the first information of such a calamity), but it has by now got down to the task of managing the consequences in right earnest.

The Centre has sanctioned a Rs 500-crore relief package, in addition to routing Rs 200 crore of assistance through the Indira Awas Yojana. Banks have been asked to be liberal with loans in the affected areas. One lakh rupees is to be paid to the nearest relative of every victim.

It is important for the government to step back and ask itself whether the scale of the calamity could have been reduced through alertness on the part of its various agencies and with appropriate advance action.

Reports speak of a gap of 40 minutes between the time the authorities got a clear indication of an earthquake in Indonesia and the tsunamis hitting the Indian coastline.

In other words, people could have been warned and precious lives saved. There are explanations doing the rounds for why this could not be done, one of them being that the meteorological department, which received the information about the quake, did not have the correct fax number of the minister for science and technology.

The other explanation is that the government did not have instruments to gauge the progress of the tsunamis. Nor did it get any warning from international bodies, because it is not a member of the international club that monitors tsunamis.

The government has now woken up to the magnitude of the problem and decided to instal the instruments required to monitor tsunamis. After all, some studies talk of more tsunamis hitting the Indian coastline, not only on its east coast but on the west as well, endangering bigger cities with larger populations.

Given the generally poor state of preparedness in responding to natural calamities, the government needs to get its act together and prepare for future emergencies of this nature.