Disaster response: Is India prepared?

Sanjay Badri-Maharaj

The enormity of rescue efforts in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in the United States raises serious questions about our own disaster response preparedness. Indeed how prepared is India to respond to urban (or indeed any) emergencies on a similar scale? The state of our firefighting capability illustrates just how far we need to go. In a population of 1 billion, there are only 66.000 firefighters in all of India with 6,000 machines. This is preposterous. There are acute shortages of heavy rescue equipment and protective gear. Hazardous materials units are ad hoc at best, and those units that do exist are saddled with obsolete equipment and poor maintenance. Out of a requirement for 1,219,000 civil defense volunteers, only about have 510,000 been raised and of these, 477,000 trained.

Is it money? More is spent compensating people after disasters and reconstructing. What is that much of the equipment needed can be procured within India. There are several Indian companies that manufacture high quality firefighting and protective gear. One such company - Joseph Leslie - can even supply thermal imaging devices for searching rubble. There is therefore an urgent and immediate need for a dramatic overhaul of our disaster response abilities. An expansion program for all urban fire-fighting units needs to be undertaken with emphasis on hazardous materials and modern urban search and rescue techniques. All urban centers need to be properly provisioned with these units. Industrial plants of all types must also take notice. Proper equipment and training must be provided to ensure that these plants can cope with any disaster. Civil defense units and Home Guards must also be properly trained and stockpiles of equipment - fire-fighting gear, protective equipment etc. - should be provided and earmarked for their use. The NCC should also intensify its civil defense training and also stockpile equipment. It might not be a bad idea for each fire-fighting unit to maintain a large reserve of water and fire-fighting foam. This might require a substantial improvement in the physical structure of many fire stations - improvements that need to be undertaken anyway in light of the earthquake in Gujarat.

The Central paramilitary forces and the State Armed Police Battalions must, out of sheer necessity, be trained and equipped for secondary search and rescue and fire-fighting roles. Training and modern equipment - and adequate supplies of this equipment - must be provided to these units since they are often immediately available for rapid deployment to a disaster area. The CISF is ideal for immediate conversion to a dual tasked unit. The same applies to the armed forces whose outstanding performance in every disaster to date must be tempered y the realization that even they lack modern SAR equipment. This shortcoming must be rectified and additional fire-fighting systems provided to them to protect their own ammunition depots as well as for potential deployment to disaster sites. The attacks on the United States have indicated - if Indians did not know already - that the homeland is vulnerable to attacks that the armed forces cannot defend against. The second line of defense must then become of great importance and it is high time that Indians demanded, were willing to fund and willing to volunteer for a massive improvement in these facilities.

The Centre, state and municipal authorities must now realize that this requires cooperation on a scale hitherto unseen. It behooves every Indian citizen to demand remedial action and to monitor the actions of the governments in this regard. We cannot afford not to, as terrorist attacks and natural disasters are generally equal opportunity killers.