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'I just had to see what I could do'

The team from Sulabh International, builders of public toilets, arrived late one evening. They were just another group in a steady stream of volunteers, Home Guards, paramilitary forces, doctors, Army soldiers, water quality experts and others, all coming into Erasama after the killer cyclone. But Saroj Jha, the Indian Administrative Service officer directing cyclone relief operations in Erasama, was particularly glad to see the Sulabh people. A request for their services, made several days earlier through government channels, had meandered into thin air. So the previous day, he had asked a Non Governmental Organisation representative from Bhubaneswar to speak to Sulabh. Now they were here.

Jha welcomed them as he did every other group that showed up at his desk in the compound of the local primary health centre. With an encouraging smile, he said: "Get to work."

That, the Sulabh people definitely did. When I met them close to midnight the same night, they were already digging a large pit and clearing the ground for a platform. At seven the next morning, I was astonished at what they had done. The toilet block was nearly ready: two brick platforms erected, Indian-style commodes in place, drainage complete. These guys had worked through the night! By late afternoon, they were finished. The platforms were cemented, plastic and bamboo partitions set up. One block for women, one for men, complete with signs. They had built four such pairs of blocks around Erasama. Not only that, they were getting ready to fan out into surrounding villages, some still inaccessible, to repeat their good work.

Now certainly the urgency had much to do with the people flooding into Erasama, all accustomed to using toilets. Until this cyclone struck, most here were content to use the surrounding fields to excretory advantage, local governments content to let that continue. Relief workers had had to resort to the same methods. But their sheer numbers made those methods impractical, to say no more. That was why Jha sent out the call to Sulabh. And their dedication took my breath away. What governments, local and otherwise, had failed to do in a half-century, what even private bodies had failed to do -- build public sanitation here -- Sulabh had produced in one night and change.

There was something both encouraging and dispiriting in this. Encouraging, because of the diligence and enthusiasm with which volunteer teams in Erasama, like Sulabh's, have worked in this cyclone-devastated area, what they have accomplished already. Far more remains to be done, but you cannot help but be inspired by what these selfless efforts have brought about. Dispiriting, because you wonder: did it really need a cyclone?

The day I left Bhubaneswar for Erasama, The Asian Age carried a report crammed with statistics about the cyclone and what was being done to cope with the destruction, all "according to official sources." In it, I read that there had been 351,979 cattle deaths. Not 351,980, not 351,978, but 351,979. Similar exactitude applied in dozens of other cases. I learned that 1,571,218 hectares of "standing paddy crops" had been destroyed; 85,532 carcasses had been burned; 731,941 heads of poultry had been killed; 2,688,310 halogen tablets distributed for water purification; 119.5 trucks of medicines dispatched. Also, 484,113 people had been given preventive vaccinations.

I read this and I knew. I simply had to go to Erasama to see this for myself. I mean, who did the counting to find 731,941 chickens dead? What about those 119 and a half trucks, the half in particular? And how were nearly half a million people vaccinated in just over two weeks? Who were the guys working at a pace of 30,000 vaccinations a day, better than one every three seconds?

Needless to say, I got no answers to those questions. But clearly, some corner of Orissa officialdom had cranked into full gear to deal with the cyclone, even if it was only the Department to Hand Out Meaningless Statistics to Unquestioning Journalists. But did all this have any bearing on the ground? Out in Erasama?

Curiously, it both did and did not. Once there, you quickly forget the figures. They mean nothing by themselves (really, how DO you count precisely 731,941 dead chickens in an area so badly devastated?). But if you take them metaphorically, as an indication that there is work being done in the aftermath of the cyclone, now that's something else. For while the suffering was immense and continues, while governments in Bhubaneswar and Delhi play their silly games to show each other up, while there is much bungling and red tape and so forth -- in spite of all this, there are good things happening in Erasama too.

Let me run through just what I saw, or heard about. There was the Sulabh effort. In my last column, I mentioned some volunteers disposing of bodies. There were others too: Army jawans; the Tata Relief Committee, Tata employees from Jamshedpur including the redoubtable Everest heroine Bachendri Pal; the Central Rourkela Relief Committee, 40 doctors and social workers from that city; Orissa Youth Congress volunteers.

The Tata Relief Committee had also brought piles of relief supplies and were systematically taking them to distant, inaccessible villages. I tagged along on one of these trips, a three-hour ride in an Army boat to the village of Padampur, right on the coast. In places, the water level in the river was too low to run the outboard motor -- in fact our two boats broke a propeller each -- so we had to row long distances. When we got there, the villagers gathered for their quota of aid: a couple of aluminium utensils, a ration of puffed rice, a sheet of polythene, about a kilogram of gur (jaggery) and a hurricane lantern. It was handed out according to long lists of names on which the villagers put their thumbprints.

Of course, there remain problems with the distribution of relief. Many villages still are very hard to reach, which has two consequences. One, the more accessible villages have had an excess of material dumped on them. Two, villagers are walking as much as 20 kilometres every day to get aid.

There was also one false note that I wish the TRC people had dealt with better. An old man shook the box that contained his lantern. From the clinking, it was clear: the glass had broken. He asked for another, but was waved away. I took him to the man in charge and explained what had happened. He shrugged his shoulders and told me: "That's what he gets." I had to send the old man on his way, but later I wished I had strolled around behind the crowd and pinched a lantern for him.

One afternoon, a team of sweepers arrived from Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, with three days of their time to offer. They were put to work cleaning up Erasama town and then given eight other villages. Women from something called the International Society for Indecency Prevention were stationed in Ambiki village. They run a free kitchen there, providing food to 3,000 people in the area. Twenty thousand cooked meals came every day from a kitchen in Erasama run by the National Thermal Power Corporation. Six young interns from Pune turned up with a jeep-load of medical supplies and a week to offer. They were dispatched to Ambiki too, to take over from two doctors who had spent four days running a clinic there. A team from Oxfam has surveyed the area and plans to disinfect nearly 3,000 wells in two weeks. The Army has two regiments in the area, repairing roads and bridges and running six boats for relief work. The Medecins Sans Frontiers people have identified the distribution of polythene sheets, plastic water containers and soap as immediate needs. "These are public health issues," said their logistician in Erasama, Gerard Calzada.

And I cannot forget P K Gupta, a thirty-year-old from a big Delhi bank. No doctor, no logistician, no expert on anything, PK seems to have seen reports on the cyclone, got up from his desk and taken the next train to Orissa. He was in Erasama with the clothes on his back and a sheet to sleep on. Not a thing more. Last heard of, he had spent three days tramping tirelessly through villages, speaking to every single family about its needs, reporting back to the doctors and relief teams about what he learned.

PK also had a particular puzzle he wanted to solve for himself. "I want to check the vaastu shastra of all the mandirs, yaar. If you notice, not a single mandir was damaged by the cyclone."

Through the days I spent in Erasama, as I watched all these people do their bit, I kept asking myself: Why? Why have these ordinary people left their ordinary lives to travel to this desperate corner of India, to do often awful, backbreaking work for the victims of a terrible calamity? What makes them do it uncomplainingly, over and over again? What makes an IAS officer rise above the sad stereotype of inefficiency and sloth we all nurture about the bureaucracy, rise above it to run such a mammoth relief operation so smoothly?

No answers again, so I asked PK. Why was he here? " Arre yaar," he said, "I just had to see what I could do."

In its own simple way, an astonishingly moving answer.

Tailpiece

In a column here some days ago, T V R Shenoy criticised the Orissa chief secretary for leaving for the United States after the cyclone hit the state. Such criticism has been repeated elsewhere, among others by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

It would be fair criticism had the chief secretary taken off on a Disneyland jaunt. But there were reports that the chief secretary's daughter in the USA had a medical emergency, which is why he went. At the very least, he must have had an agonising choice to make, one I wouldn't want to make myself. In not mentioning this little detail, T V R Shenoy and the others who pounced on this were unfair, even unethical.

There are two other points to clarify in T V R Shenoy's column. With good reason, he praises the aid to Orissa from Chandrababu Naidu after the cyclone. Then he asks: "How many teams did [Orissa's other neighbours: Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar] send and how well did they perform? The answer is best expressed by a discreet silence." Actually the answer needs no silence. I have no idea about WB and Bihar, but in the time I spent in Erasama, it was hard to miss the large contingent of MP Home Guards that had camped there. They were busy with tasks ranging from cremating bodies to preserving the peace in distant villages.

Shenoy also points out that the RSS is involved in relief work, and says: "Once upon a time, the Congress Seva Dal would also have been involved in such work. No longer!" I have no idea if the CSD is in Orissa or not, but there was certainly a large collection of Orissa Youth Congress volunteers fanning out to deal with carcasses.

Shenoy's entire article seems to be an attempt to criticise the Orissa government and the Congress. That's about par for partisans of all stripes when calamities strike, but it makes these clarifications of mine seem like a defence of both. Not at all. The Orissa government has a lot to answer for: in Erasama, apart from S K Jha and a few officials with him, the absence of the Orissa government's involvement in relief operations is nothing short of shameful.

Dilip D'Souza