(This is the transcript from Prof. Anil K Gupta's talk at Ahmedabad Management Association, AMA. The talk identifies an approach for relief and rehabilitation, in view of the death and destruction caused by earthquake in various parts of India)

This is a very grim occasion when we have had one of the worst tragedies of our times. The scale at which the recent earthquake has caused the misery is unlikely to have another parallel in the recent history of our country.  When, four of us (two faculty members, one student and one SRISTI volunteer) went to Kutch two days back, we could not see anybody complaining, in any village, . We stood outside the collectorate to watch and observe people. We found nobody shouting, nobody fighting, nobody arguing. We went to the village Damadka which is famous for textiles and ‘Dhamadka’ prints. It was totally ravaged, with hardly  two or three houses standing. And what did people ask for when we inquired about their needs? They said, if the bus service could be started as early as possible and electricity could be provided, they would get on with their lives, start economic activities. If an economy activity could begin, they thought, they could take charge of their life. The children were playing and one boy was singing a song. When we enquired we found that this boy has lost his father but was determined to move ahead. It was a great exposure for us, that when such a great tragedy has happened, people on their own are not helping themselves to receive things; but unfortunately, the way of giving in many cases were not dignified. The ideal way of giving is where the giver feels obliged. Again, many people who were distributing things, we felt, have not done their homework enough in terms of how the distribution should be organized. So the first concern that I had in the process of how we go about adopting either a village or an activity was that we must learn the basis of giving as we all know it; we all know that none of us would like to accept anything from anyone if the act of giving is not dignified. It is ingrained in our culture yet we forget it when we want to give it to someone. So, can the process of reconstruction in Kutch be dignified, can it be reciprocal? In other wants there is a great deal of learning to be made from the people of Kutch, and the foremost of them is that nobody is complaining even in the midst of a great tragedy. The situation is grim, no doubt about that, but what I want to emphasize is, the situation is not so grim as to sap the fortitude, sap their capacity to keep their morale high among the other people. It has not eroded their pride in themselves, there were a few villages where people refused to accept aid. There was  a doctor whose entire family was wiped out but he was saying: `I am now free; tell me what I should do, I will do it’. We have heard about a few people in Ahmedabad helping each other but unfortunately the media has not reported people in Kutch helping each other.

The second issue which is also important is, those of us who are in the corporate sector and who are going to avail tax benefits for the contribution are actually using part of the tax payer’s money. And without sense the act of giving is not your own but lot of other people in  the society who otherwise would have benefited from the expenditure of cash revenues, which the government has received, have also contributed. So we should remember that we are not the real do-ers, we are only a conduit.   

In few places we did see lot of banners but I would not like to name those corporates who are supposed to have adopted villages. We wanted to see what they are doing and so we went around. I would say that `let the work of reconstruction itself speak for the corporates rather than the banners.’ The process has to made more dignified so that people would take about what the corporates have done. A good act never goes unrewarded in our society; first, the act itself is a reward.    

I want to show a small matrix our students have made (which is being improved of course) which will help us to consent when you complain about the government that its work is chaotic, it is not visible in the villages at the moment, which is true. But I am not willing to accept that it is beyond the capacity of the state of Gujarat whose growth is double that of  Indian average, not to be able to manage things better. I would not go into what kind of improvements one can do generally but I would like to focus now on, `those of us who want to contribute to this process, what are the things that we could do and what are the features of adoption that we should  keep in mind.’ Many people have suggested and in our group when we were discussing with the students during brainstorming, issue coming out time and again was `do we rehabilitate through supply route or demand route’.    

What the government does is, it follows the supply route and has its hands off after it. If houses are not  there, they build them, if school is not there, they build it; that is all. After the 1956 earthquake, they left part of the village just like that; you can still see the damaged portion of the village. The houses that were damaged were left like that, people build their houses separately. Of course they did not have access to the science and technology, that is another issue. Can we incorporate the talent that is available in this country in science and technology, formal and informal, in the process of rehabilitation? CSIR had offered all its help; they said that, within twenty four hours any scientist they needed, would arrive at the site. And they arrived after seven days!

The first issue on rehabilitation is to `rehabilitate the community structures’, because the communities have been captured either because the people have left or because  they are not able to contact each other since the shock was great and sudden. So, if you take the demand route, one thing that we could do is to see what are the activities that could be done there, which things you could procure: If there are economic activities, we can divert that region; if they can, they should. You can buy and give a buy back guarantee or buy back arrangement. So that economic system picks up. As I told you, the initial request that came from the villagers was restoration of power and starting of bus service. So, can we think not just about rehabilitating in physical  terms but also economically, can we rehabilitate by looking at what functions, features like productive activities can be performed by the people? This will help in two ways: (i) When I am busy doing something I feel less about my sorrow. (ii) It will help other people come back.  

The second thing is, can we rebuild the communication information networks? This area has a very poor infrastructure. The number of telephone or the distribution of one telephone is one of the least provided-for in our state. So one of the things we must appreciate is, when we have to rebuild infrastructure, we should rebuild it in such a way that it has a density of access. My worry is that many of the corporations or companies will be getting interested in houses and specific activity in that village and they will not probably look at infrastructure change. What will happen is, probably some of the activities in the villages will be rebuilt (which will come in a very short time) but the infrastructure would remain weak. So, the whole economic impulse will get sapped and an opportunity that is offered to us by this crisis to rebuild Kutch in a productive dynamic manner will be lost. My appeal therefore is, we should think of rebuilding the communication structure first of all which is within our reach. There is a wireless loop system developed by I.I.T, Madras which is a very cost effective one and it is already operating in two districts of Andhra Pradesh. Hence the cost of laying down the lines, as against 30, 000 – 40,000 for DoT, comes down to about 11,000 (roughly one third). So, there is technology available which can be used to by-pass the copper wire technology for communication. You might be wondering why I am talking about communication. It is because we have to realize that it is the most urgent one. Lilpar is a village in Rapar which has the least telephone density of all taluka's in Kutch; it has very few NGOs. An Institute in Lilpar "Gram Swarajaya Sangh" though itself affected,  mobilised all  the teachers and the staff to work in distribution of relief material and coordinating efforts of other NGO's camped up in the Institute. We need to recognize the problem of these institutions working there which have provided relief for the first ten days, which now need volunteers, vehicles and support to be able to continue, and I don’t think for less than year we are going to be providing them shelter. The tents that have been provided will be unfit to live in once summer arrives. How can we built this communication network and ensure that they could communicate? We need a system which is robust; we require probably non-wire systems like the cell activated phones.

Where do we have a database of which institutions, which corporation is doing what? Whatever we want to do in a village like schools (education), healthcare and others, each activity costs money. The cost will always be varying. One can adopt a whole district if he has the capacity but we don’t have the capacity. Assume for a minute that it is Jamnagar or Rajkot; the scale is limited. So one can take whole of Jamnagar or Rajkot rather than adopting one village or one faculty. But in Kutch you can’t adopt a district because the scale is too high.   

If you go to a Taluka (in Kutch say you can adopt a Taluka) and say, `let me adopt all houses in Anjar, then I come to know what it will cost, because people who want to adopt should know whether they can afford such a scale. Alternatively they can join with somebody if they alone cannot afford it. Four or five people can join together and they can either take care of schools in all the villages or all functions in one village.  

Let us say somebody wants to build a portfolio adoption --- `I want to build in this village a school and a health centre.’   

(a) So he adopts two activities, he gets the total at the end and that activity gets blocked.

(b) Then comes the frequency at which it should be monitored. Who will monitor it? Obviously I have adopted it; someway I should monitor it.

(c) To maintain transparency in the system: You should make sure that you have enough time at the top level to get the feed back as to what is happening in the village every now and then.

So you can choose different portfolio of activities depending upon the scale at which one wants to do in a village. This is a very simple preliminary exercise essentially to ensure that we know who is doing what and where. It should be integrated with GIS (Geographical Information system) map so that from the map you can see who is working where. For example, you are going to your village and on the way there are three other villages, people of which you know. You can convey to them anything they required. We must work with a co-operative spirit and this is possible only when I know who is working on my  route so that you can give and take messages.

For some time this old ancient system of communication has to be followed.  

The second thing is, it may so happen that the relief material that is lying in your area (the village you have adopted) is of no use to you but somebody else in another village needs it. So we need to have a system of inventory management with individual people who are adopting a village. When we went to Kutch, we realized very quickly that one major problem was, they did not know what was coming at the Bhuj airport, what was being un-loaded at Gandhidham station. If you do not know what is where, you cannot use it efficiently. So we built a kind of a simple logistics management system which is being installed today in Bhuj. This will give than a clear picture of what is coming in from where, what is in the store and where it is going. It will be linked with GIS which we are trying to build tomorrow for Rapar first and then for other Talukas. If the state wants to send something to some place, and you are also sending the same thing there, it is duplication. We complain about state but mind you, co ordination among NGOs themselves is weak. So we will see in few months time how well we coordinate; it is a challenge to us. Everybody must remember that all of us will be under scrutiny.  I have noticed even among the NGOs the coordination in Kutch was better than that in Ahmedabad. So when you take decisions please empower your colleagues in the field.  

The five things I want to remember when I am trying to adopt a village or an activity.

(i) Culture: These villages have very old culture. We are talking here about a five thousand years old culture; we have to respect it. There are some villages where there are discrimination against harijans and those problems we cannot solve, it is not within our capacity. But we have to remember that the distribution planks cannot be single. In such villages you have to separately provide for the harijans, and separately to others. It has not happened in some of the villages. (We don’t have maps as yet of hamlets in Kutch. Now hamlets either  in some cases are those of farmers who have shifted their houses near the wells; or in other cases are of socially backward communities, harijans who live outside in hamlets. So, you have a very entrepreneurial class or a very poor class and we have no way of monitoring how many of them have received blankets or other relief material. Any way if ten percent is covered, it does not really matter at this moment but when the coverage will be 80% or more, it becomes critical that where do you provide the extra relief material). So, the first thing is, we have to respect the culture and do not get involved too much. We are not there to solve all their problems; we cannot.  

(ii) Transparency: What we can do, whatever activity we take up, we must make it participative;  and make it transparent. It is very important that whatever is done, the accounts of the activities are displayed on a board. We always say there is corruption in the system but we ourselves become translucent, sometime opaque: we don’t share our balance sheets with people, we don’t share our accounts with others and then we complain about every other system not working.

(iii) Overhead: When we were talking to the Kutch Yuvak Mandal, they said that when the cyclone came they built 470 houses. Most of them are intact, some of them have either fallen down or have developed cracks. They also said that, at that time they did not make accounts in any of their activities and this time it would be difficult for them to work without overheads. Overhead means cost of supervision, cost of servicing, cost of keeping track of accounts and things like that.  If they are going to work with NGOs, then if overheads will not be covered, something else will suffer. We must appreciate therefore that this is an economic endeavor that we are making; we want good returns when we make good investments.

Two days back somebody was saying that at least one faculty member must go there every week for two days at least for six months. Next week one of us will go there and we will be focusing on Rapar.   

(iv) Breakdown Investments: Each taluka needs such kind of sampling, and for that different institutions have to join hands. We will help in keeping track of what is happening there. Let there be competition in producing quality houses, quality schools, building good libraries in the schools, etc. Somebody said that he can’t sponsor a school but he can take care of the library in the school. The reason I suggested the activity part in the discussion was, `let us not make difficult for people to join hands’. Even if somebody wants to provide a wall clock in  each wall, he should not hesitate to do it, because many schools do not have wall clocks. We should understand that whatever is good enough for people here is good enough for them too. So the fourth thing is, let us break down the investments into smaller units. Let us have the feeling of participation. Please, for God’s sake let us realize that in many places people will say: “You need not build anything in our village. You just help us in economic restructuring, make our livelihood system viable. We will take care of our houses.” The first lesson I learnt was,  “if goals do not change in the process of implementation, then it is not participatory’. Common properties are most difficult to build and generally people, while being rehabilitated, would realize that the outside work is more valuable for common properties, than for private properties. We must therefore always emphasize on the rehabilitation of the common properties first followed by the private property because the common property serves the community.  

(v) There is a village which is a Muslim predominated area. There is  Muslim Sevak Samaj which is assigned to rehabilitate the village. Why should a Muslim should be entrusted the work of rehabilitating Muslims? Why should Muslim community  consider themselves responsible for rehabilitating a Muslim village? Unfortunately, by our narrow-mindedness, we are reinforcing and disrupting communal harmony. (We never had communal riots in Kutch.) I am sorry to say this but I saw this happening. We should instead do some extra effort to do just the opposite. Let us try to restore the spirit of communal harmony. So when you do strategic planning about who will do what and where, if it requires little effort, you must ensure that different communities help each other. This is a harmonious society and we have no right to communalize it.  It is happening; we should avoid it. I think within our capacity, we can do it, we can rehabilitate the place, we can restore the dignity of Kutch, we can make it a wonderful place and a better place.  

I will close by saying rehabilitation is a painful process. We have to learn from lessons of Latur, we have to learn from lessons of Orissa, we have to learn from the lessons of Uttar Kashi, we have to learn from the lessons of cyclone in 1998 in Kutch itself. It is within our capacity to do a much better job provided we recognize that we will exchange notes every now and then, we will learn from each other. There should be ‘on-line’ and physical way of communicating with each other. And let us ensure that everything that we do there will be of the best quality that is possible in this country. So please review the things that we have done on the last ten days. Let us re-orient our relief efforts also, let us reorient our inventories. Let us have a common pool so that anybody who wants to contribute would register their intentions. Whatever we have learnt should be pooled. Five to seven people can be empowered who will take the right decisions in matching the demands/intentions.    

We invite people to come to http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/~iimacore.html and http://www.sristi.org/dmis.html which is our website. If you go there you will find for example the supply buttons/switch. If you press it, it gives you the choices – volunteer, supply of medicine, supply of equipment, whatever. There is a form and you can fill it up. This form then gets entered in the database. Likewise, you can fill what you want (what activities). Both will be matched and action can be taken. All the institutions in Ahmedabad are willing to participate in this endeavor.