Death's Building-Blocks

The only faint silver lining to the tragedy that's struck Gujarat is the heightened awareness of the power of nature and the shortsighted folly of man it's awakened in elements of the Indian intelligentsia. Ever since the full magnitude of the catastrophe became apparent, more and more people have begun to wonder how many other tragedies are waiting to happen. Last week, The Hindu published a report that an even larger earthquake was overdue in the Himalayas, and that its epicentre would most probably lie in the Kumaon-Nepal-Sikkim region. A day later the Himachal Pradesh CM Prem Kumar Dhumal announced that no building plans would be passed by his government that did not conform to existing standards for earthquake resistance. All across India, people are realising that drought and epidemics aren't the only natural calamities the State needs to anticipate and be prepared to cope with. Earthquakes too must be factored into its calculations. That awareness is reflected in Union agriculture minister Nitish Kumar's decision to call back the draft National Calamity Management bill for reconsideration before it becomes law. As he himself admitted, the Gujarat earthquake has made it 'inadequate'.

The reason why earthquakes have become a potent threat was, ironically, highlighted by a remark made by migrant workers from Orissa, who'd just returned home from Bhuj: 'Thank God we lived in shanties'. In Bhuj, Ahmedabad, and a dozen other smaller towns that were hit by the quake, most of the deaths were caused by the collapse of multi-storey, cement-concrete structures. These are all the fruits of economic development. Industrialisation has led to urbanisation and growing prosperity. Rising urban densities have made high-rise construction attractive, while rising incomes have made them economically viable. Had Gujarat not been so highly developed, fewer people would've died. Both industrialisation and urbanisation are inexorable. Thus with each passing year, and each dollar's increase in the gnp, there'll be more and more Bhujs waiting to happen.

It's also ironic that it took Bhuj to wake Dhumal up to the fact that Shimla too is in a seismically active zone. The truth is that he's known this all along but, like the municipal corporations of Bhuj, Ahmedabad, and every other city or town in India, has chosen to turn a blind eye to the possibility of catastrophe. Indeed, governments in Himachal, including Dhumal's, have actively connived at breaking their own building laws wholesale. For him to speak now of respecting these laws is like Veerappan offering to become a policeman if pardoned! The truth, as The Hindu pointed out, is that the entire Himalayan region is seismically extremely active. Over the past century, it's experienced four big earthquakes with an energy release measuring 8-8.5 on the Richter or 20-100 times the power of the Gujarat quake. Shimla is plumb in the middle of the central region of the Himalayas and hasn't known a big earthquake for the last two hundred years and is therefore ripe for one now.

Shimla already has building laws that fully recognise this danger. These specify that no building can be more than two-and-a-half storeys high, and that there must be setbacks around each that prevents it from collapsing upon its neighbours. For more than two decades however, these laws have been observed only in the breach. The first, and still the prime, culprit is the government's own Himachal Pradesh Housing Board.In around 1980 it began to build four, five and six-storey Ferro-concrete structures all over Simla. Its example came as a boon to private builders who followed suit, and to petty government officials who received large sums of money to smooth out the paperwork. Thus Shimla has turned into a beehive of tall, poorly constructed offices, apartments and hotels built literally upon each other on 60° and 70° slopes, with nowhere for inhabitants to go if they wish to escape.

Each violation of the building laws has brought new actors into the race for short-term gains. This 'race to the bottom' received its strongest fillip when the HP high court decided to build itself a new courtroom block. Not content with breaking the law marginally, it built an 11-storey building! Enthused by the judiciary's example, the Shimla Telephone Authority is, right now, building a new, seven-storey exchange in a congested bazaar in north Shimla! To get an idea of the potential catastrophe, one only needs to remember that while Shimla's winter population is about 100,000, in summer it's more than a million.

Shimla's experience isn't exceptional. All over India, greed and corruption have joined hands with the compulsion to demolish whatever little regulatory framework had existed at the time of independence. Other countries that've gone through, or are currently experiencing, the pangs of early capitalism are no different. But not all of them are located in such seismically active regions as India. The seismic activity is born of the fact that the entire Deccan shield is moving north at approximately 3-5 cm a year. This caused the ocean floor to buckle and created the Himalayas, which are still rising. As a result, there's no part of India except for the Deccan plateau that's not prone to serious earthquakes.

Today, the worst of the catastrophes-in-waiting isn't Shimla but the Tehri dam. Despite a number of reappraisals, and a sincere effort to design the dam so it'll withstand a giant earthquake, there is no way in which Tehri, or any dam, can withstand an 8.2 or 8.5 earthquake. The entire project is therefore a giant gamble. The only way to minimise the escalating danger from earthquakes as India industrialises is not to build storage dams in the Himalayas, and to adopt a radically different mode of urban planning and architecture. But economics apart, the Indian middle-class' desire to slavishly emulate every feature of a western lifestyle will ensure that nothing is done. Perhaps the time has come to look for Indian solutions to Indian problems.