December 14, 2015 FIX OUR CITIES: PART ONE
Army help makes the difference between life and death
When they were last heard, on the night of December 1, Lt. Col. Venkatesan and his wife Geetha were talking loudly to their daughter on the phone.
The water level was rising rapidly across most parts of Chennai, and in no time, the nearby river gushed into Defence Colony, Nandambakkam, and engulfed their ground-floor house. While their neighbours moved to the upper floors or rooftops, the old couple were trapped. A neighbour’s efforts to alert the Army to their plight failed.
Around the time when the two were drowning, Deepthi Velachamy had gone into labour. Efforts by the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) to evacuate her on a boat was deemed too risky, and she moved to the rooftop where a Cheetah helicopter of the Indian Air Force (IAF) hovered, and a soldier pulled her into it. The shaky visuals of the daring rescue have gone viral since.
On December 4, she gave birth to twins.
Contrasting plight
The contrasting plight of the elderly couple and the pregnant young woman captures what is increasingly a consistent feature of natural disasters across India: access to the Indian military rescue team is the only difference between life and death for those affected.There is no other organisation, at the Centre and State levels, that has the kind of logistics capabilities, trained manpower and willingness to wade into a disaster zone.
Before the tiny window of opportunity for timely protest slips away, here is a question for all of us — not just
flood-affected residents of Chennai; this is a question for those who ran out during the earthquake in New Delhi last week and those who dealt with
Cyclone Phyan in Gujarat a few months ago: what next?
The answer, better not be, nothing. Not this time.
It has been drilled and etched in our collective brains that the first 72 hours of any disaster, we fend for ourselves. The state response, if at all it comes after that window, will be a welcome and unexpected relief.
“Responding to natural disasters for immediate rescue and relief has now become a key function of all three arms of the military. I cannot see any change to it for a very long time to come,” said a senior military officer involved in recent operations.
“The question is no more whether the military should be involved in rescue and relief, but how do we improve coordination with the civil administration.”