The lull before and after the dust storm, lightning deaths
If you thought the Karnataka Assembly election is the biggest storm to hit the nation right now, you will be forgiven for living in a country where never-ending elections and fighting politicians are the catastrophes that keep us away from the real-life sufferings and human causalities.
So when an actual calamity struck and killed 60 people across the country on Sunday (May 13), national TV was still busy "managing" the disaster that hit the two major parties following a prediction of hung Assembly in Karnataka by most exit polls.
Dust storms and thunderstorms killed at least 53 people in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi and Bihar. While Uttar Pradesh was the worst hit with 39 dead, nine people lost their lives in Andhra Pradesh. Four were killed in West Bengal and one in Delhi, according to news reports.
Thunderstorms also hit some places in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Assam, Meghalaya, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Not a bolt from the blue
This was not the first spate of deaths due to thunderstorms and dust storms this summer. On May 2, storms had hit UP, Rajasthan, Telangana, Uttarakhand and Punjab, in which as many as 134 people were killed and over 400 injured. UP again was the worst sufferer with 80 deaths.
In the aftermath of that, the India Meteorological Department warned against thunderstorms and squalls with wind speed of 50km-70km per hour across 20 states for three days from Monday (May 7).
As a result, a few state governments declared a holiday for schools on that Monday. But as the warning proved inaccurate (to nobody's surprise), the Met department was ripped apart for creating panic and precaution overdrive.
Several vehicles turned turtle and fell on each other on Delhi-Kanpur Highway, following heavy rainfall and dust storm in #Bulandshahr, yesterday pic.twitter.com/IU6eL8kzEG
— ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 14, 2018
Dust storm hits Ghaziabad. Visuals from Indirapuram. pic.twitter.com/QC5D8L0wEp
— ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 13, 2018
Delhi: Dust storm, strong winds and rainfall hit the national capital, visuals from Janpath area. pic.twitter.com/3qfZpzsePJ
— ANI (@ANI) May 13, 2018
#WATCH: Dust storm lashed Moradabad. #UttarPradesh pic.twitter.com/AvtKZziuYF
— ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 13, 2018
On May 9, several parts of Uttar Pradesh though were struck by a severe storm that left 18 dead and 27 others injured. But then the Met department could hardly take any credit since its predictions were not specific.
Criticising the weatherman, Ashok Jaswal, a former scientist with the Met department, Pune, was quoted as saying by the Scroll.in: "Weather warning has to be specific, else people do not take these alerts seriously.
“The Met department had listed a whole lot of states, but not all were badly affected by the thunderstorm. Also, ‘isolated places’ in large states like Uttar Pradesh or Rajasthan are meaningless.”
According to the same report, UP CM Yogi Adityanath was also upset with the weather department for not alerting the residents on time. The CM perhaps was more upset because he had to cut short his Karnataka election campaigning in wake of the storm warning.
Of course, as was pointed out, this is not the first time that the Met department's efficacy was questioned, and rightly so.
But is the weather-beaten Met department the only culprit? How seriously does our government take natural calamities?
Government and disaster management
To its credit, the Modi government in 2016 announced the National Disaster Management Plan (NDMP) with a blueprint for making the country "disaster-resilient and significantly reducing loss of lives and livelihoods".
At that time, media reports celebrated it as the "first-ever national plan for disaster management".
The NDMP was also touted as a "dynamic document" by the home ministry, saying that "it will be periodically improved keeping up with the emerging global best practices and knowledge bases in disaster management".
"The vision of the plan is to make India disaster-resilient, achieve substantial disaster risk reduction, and significantly decrease the losses of life, livelihoods, and assets - economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental - by maximising the ability to cope with disasters at all levels of administration as well as among communities," according to a home ministry statement.
For the uninitiated, India's nodal agency for disaster management is the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), which came into existence following the National Disaster Management Act of 2005. Interestingly, the act came into being on December 26, 2005, the first anniversary of the devastating tsunami of 2004 that killed nearly 13,000 people in India alone.
In 2009, the National Policy on Disaster was approved by the government, according to which while the primary responsibility of disaster management rests with the states, the central government supports the efforts of states by providing logistical and financial support.
But despite laws and material support seemingly in place and India making substantial scientific and material progress, the loss of lives and property due to disasters has not decreased over the years.
Why is it that every time state governments are caught unawares? Apart from Cyclone Phailin in 2013 - one of the worst storms India has seen in recent times - which was handled commendably by both the state and central governments, India is yet to make any significant gains in disaster management.
While the government revelled in the “landmark success in disaster management” during Cyclone Phailin, it failed to learn that one key lesson that prevention is always better than cure.
Despite repeated loss of lives and large-scale damage to properties every year, natural disasters in India are mostly left to be handled by fate. The apathy of governments across states have almost succeeded in making Indians believe that only god can save them from storms, floods, cyclones and earthquakes.
Sunday's death toll is also a telling commentary on the country's overall unpreparedness to tackle any major calamity. If issuing vague alerts was the best that the Met office could do, respective state governments absolved themselves with "we declared a holiday" excuses.
Despite the warning signs lurking for days, no one thought it important to draw up an action plan about temporary shelters, helplines, or power outages, and most importantly traffic movement.
The Delhi Traffic Police though issued an advisory on May 7 after the weather office predicted thunderstorms in the national capital and adjoining areas, again thanks to the Met department's prophecy, that advisory proved to a dud when it was actually needed.
Not everyone was oblivious
There is one government which took the catastrophe seriously - the republic of Twitter where woke citizens did what they do best - fiercely discussing the storm and lambasting each other based on their political allegiance, only to go back to fight over Shashi Tharoor and his dead wife, Bengal panchayat polls and Karnataka elections.
This is what was trending on Twitter
Internalisation of death and devastation
But does such internalisation of death and devastation also have something to do with the fact that the common man's life doesn't matter?
Why else does the political class or the media find it less important to discuss natural calamities or to debate our disaster management policies? Why do political manifestoes never flaunt big promises to tackle natural disasters?
The media also needs to understand its social responsibility rather than becoming part of partisan politics. Sunday's tragedy also exposed how seriously the Indian media takes its weather reporting other than issuing "red alert" in flashes that create more panic than sense of warning.
If the Met department is literally weather-beaten, our media reporting of weather bulletins has not been able to get past Doordarshan-era "boonda bandi ki sambhavnaye (expected light showers)”. Of course, with the coming of social media, news organisations would rather engage in real-time spring or monsoon celebrations with Facebook Live or Twitter posts.
India may have made advancements both technologically as well as scientifically, but they are of no use unless we learn how to maximise those gains to minimise the hardships of this vast human population.
Truth be told, years of government indifference and the might of the media never pursuing such basic crises have succeeded in making the ordinary Indians resilient to such apathy, if not to disasters.
Also read: What's going on behind the scenes in Karnataka — Congress, BJP backroom talks with JD(S)?