The Hindu Business Line : Real crisis management

Emergency is the time for action, not for deliberation. A Crisis Management Committee is needed not to decide what orders should be issued during the emergency but to decide what should be done in the future to handle such crises better. Unfortunately, we do the reverse: Hold a Crisis Management Committee during the crisis, get in the way of urgent action, and forget about crisis management once the danger is past. This system impedes; it does not learn, says P. V. Indiresan.

The Central team under the leadership of A. K. Rastogi, Union Secretary (Disaster Management) holding discussions with the Kerala Chief Minister, Mr Oommen Chandy, and his colleagues in Thiruvananthapuram... Such committees should go beyond the immediate crisis.

THE TSUNAMI has come and gone. Hopefully, it will not come again for another century or two. Let us hope also that if and when it does, the country would be better prepared and equipped to face it without losing many lives.

The time has come, or will soon come, for introspection. People will ask, and have a right to ask where we went wrong. Therefore, any such introspection will start with recrimination. That is natural but not wise. If we were wise, we will look not so much for the things we did wrong but for the things we do right. Finding faults is of limited use. Finding faults helps us to understand what we should set right but not how to do so.

We are not good at searching for the things we do well. For instance, last month, we had a horrible rail tragedy in Punjab when two trains collided killing a number of passengers. That accident made the front-pages. That the Railways restored the track, and train services too within 24 hours did not.

By any description, that quick repair was an extraordinary turnaround, particularly when we consider that we cannot fill a simple pothole in the road for months, if ever.

What the Railways did in Punjab was not a flash in the pan; setting things right rapidly and immediately, is routine for it. Come emergency, the usual rules are given the go by; local officials take charge, take decisions and do all that is necessary without waiting for orders from above. In an emergency, even the station master of a lowly wayside station, has the authority to commandeer the cash in the ticket counter, and use it as he thinks fit, and do so without a by your leave from his superiors.

The Army is even better equipped to handle crisis. When a raw lieutenant leading a platoon sees intruders, he does not ask for a Crisis Management Committee to advise him what to do. He takes charge, and to the extent possible kills the intruders. If the lieutenant himself is killed, the remaining soldiers do not wait for orders from above; the senior havildar takes over and continues with the task.

There is an anecdote of an Army captain commanding a convoy ferrying urgently needed supplies to Kashmir. One of the trucks stalled and would not move, blocking the entire row of vehicles on the narrow mountain road. In that instance, too, the captain did not wait for orders, did not organise any Crisis Management Committee but made his jawans push the vehicle over the hill. He did so without consulting anyone, least of all his superiors. He did so because time was more important than the value of the truck. In fact, at that moment, the value of the stalled truck was negative; destroying it was of more value than waiting to get it repaired.

In each of these instances, what was used, and effectively too, was authoritarian order. The virtues of democracy (more recently that of laissez faire) have been so ardently sold to us, and the evils of authoritarianism so religiously instilled in our minds, that we have come to abhor authoritarianism.

Yet, emergency is not the time for holding committee meetings or let everyone have the freedom to do as they wish. It is when someone takes charge, issues orders and others obey. Emergency is also not the time for routine rules and regulations. Let us remember that "working to rule" means grinding all movement to a halt.

For instance, much needed relief supplies meant for Nagapattinam were held up in Delhi (and in Chennai too) merely because a District Magistrate had not signed some papers. What extra contribution the District Magistrate would have made to the relief effort by signing those papers? If the Magistrate's concurrence did have some value, why sign papers, why not authorise orally? Should a soldier get a written order from the commanding officer every time he wants to shoot at the enemy?

Delegation of authority and not centralisation is the essence of handling crises. The last thing we need in a crisis is a Crisis Management Committee. What can people sitting in air-conditioned rooms a thousand miles away do? Crisis is the time when the person on the spot, however low in the hierarchy, takes charge and is allowed to take charge. Crises are often better handled by the young than by the old. The old know of many things that will not work; they see obstructions everywhere; it is the youthful mind that sees opportunities where the experienced see only risks.

I was in Port Blair the fateful Sunday. I woke up bleary-eyed wondering why my wife was shaking the bed. As she was fast asleep, I wondered how she was shaking the bed. Only then did it dawn on me that we were experiencing an earthquake.

When we realised what was happening, my wife rushed out, but I, the scientist, paused to think where I should go, and finally decided to sit on a concrete slab. I wondered who was wiser: My wife who ran out immediately or I who started a mental argument to decide what to do. Do we have time to ponder over possible alternatives in emergencies, or is it best to follow instinct?

A couple of hours later, the tsunami struck. As we were in a relatively sheltered bay it was no spectacular event. A fellow holidaymaker described how the jetty near the hotel collapsed: He said: "Suddenly the sea rose rapidly, and fell as fast; the jetty collapsed."

The casual remark that my friend made, sipping peacefully a cup of coffee while admiring the view across the calm sea, did not ring alarm bells. To appreciate the full force of a crisis, you should be a witness; bald descriptions will not do. That is why we have to trust the person on the spot.

Much has been made about early warning for tsunami. The Americans who claim to have located the tsunami have given a very lame excuse that they did not know whom to contact. In these days of the world wide web, they could have asked a ten-year-old child who would have obtained for them all the information they needed. However, if they had sent the warning, how would our government have reacted? That is a moot question.

Our bureaucratic system has innumerable fine qualities but taking prompt decisions, or moving fast is not one of them.

In this, as in most natural tragedies, the poor suffer most. Therefore, the ultimate solution is economic, not technological. As Indira Gandhi remarked, poverty is the greatest pollutant; it is also a mass killer. We are all horrified at the sudden devastation caused by the tsunami; we are insensitive to the fact that larger number of children die every day in India due to malnutrition, and lack of medical care. We are shocked by sudden events — like an airplane crash; we are untouched by greater tragedies that occur every day. For instance, by the far larger casualties we suffer in road accidents every day.

Committees are expected to "deliberate". Emergency is the time for action, not for deliberation. We need a Crisis Management Committee not to decide what orders should be issued during the emergency but to decide what should be done in the future to handle such crises better. Unfortunately, we do the reverse: Hold a Crisis Management Committee during the crisis, get in the way of urgent action, and forget about Crisis Management once the danger is past. Our system impedes; it does not learn.

Let us take a simple example. Not a year passes by without a cyclone hitting our coast, causing considerable damage to property, and leading to serious loss of lives.

Cyclones can strike anywhere; they cannot be controlled or guided. Has anyone thought of what will happen if by mischance the eye of the cyclone were to land on the city of Chennai? It is on such eventualities that Crisis Management Committees should deliberate. They do not, and hope against hope that disaster will strike elsewhere.

If we had learnt our lessons from the annual visitations of cyclones, we would not have suffered as much as we did with this tsunami. We would have kept away from the coast. If we did have to do so, we would have made all our buildings sturdy. It was no accident that the 300-year-old Dutch fort survived without a scratch in Nagapattinum while recent dwellings collapsed like matchboxes.

We have learnt no lesson from the cyclones; we continue to expand our coastal cities, forgetting that for thousand years or more our rulers had their capitals not on the coast but well inside. A wise move will be to steadily wind up Chennai; expand elsewhere, some distance away from the coast. We are increasing everyday the size of the disaster that can strike Chennai. Crises are good photo opportunities for the great; they should be even better opportunities to learn.

We cannot halt once-a-century tsunami or once-a-year cyclone, but we can learn to mitigate the disasters they cause. What we should learn from this great tragedy is how to build safer, better habitations, how to ensure that the poor have better places to live. Will we? Will there be a Crisis Management Committee to deliberate and decide how to do so?

(The author is a former Director of IIT Madras. Response may be sent to indresan@vsnl.com.)

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