Three years after the tsunami struck, a
look at the way relief measures have shaped up in Pattinacherry, the
worst-hit village in the State of Puducherry.
A little baffled: A villager against
the second lot of houses waiting allocation by the government.
The people of Pattinacherry have known the sea all their lives and have
no illusions about it. They know it can be destructive. But when
something that has been the basis and foundation of their lives turns a
stranger overnight, the resulting confusion and fear can be paralysing.
Till they are helped to cope with that, they won’t be returning to the
sea.
“A village by the sea”, The Hindu
Sunday Magazine, January 9, 2005.
The people of Pattinacherry eventually did return to the sea, though it
took them six months to get their boats sailing again. Six months, when
they went through life dazed, six months when even their food, they
gratefully remember today, was cooked for them by the volunteers of an
Italian NGO.
The memories are still vivid. Against the huge losses that took them by
surprise that December day, people still remember small details with
clarity: the water level creeping up inside a house but stopping just
short of the TV; people waking up in the nick of time... and death of
loved ones that still brings tears. And though they have become a
little stoical and philosophical (“When something like that happens,
what can one really do?”) there is that lingering trace of bitterness
that even an hour’s notice on the TV could have saved so many lives.
So, three years after the disaster, what’s it like on the ground today?
Government’s efforts
Immediately after the tsunami, the government gave each family Rs.
2,000 as interim relief and Rs. 10,000 a little later. The government
also compensated them for the loss of their boats. While the owners of
bigger boats anchored in Nagapattinam, around eight of them, got about
four lakhs, owners of smaller fibre boats lost in the village got Rs.
one lakh each, while owners of catamarans with outboard engines got Rs.
50,000 and those without engines got Rs. 25,000. And that’s about the
extent of the government effort as far as Pattinacherry is concerned,
apart from donating land nearby for building new houses for the
villagers and building an embankment wall.
And, though they are aware that for many organisations the disaster was
just another occasion to make money, they do remember that more than
government presence, it was the NGOs that made them cope with the
immediacy of the many losses. They particularly remember an NGO from
Anantapur which gave the village 24 fibre boats fitted with engines and
fishing nets. And another Nagapattinam-based NGO, Sneha, compensated
each family Rs. 10,000-30,000 for damage to their houses, depending on
whether they had mud houses or tile houses and the extent of the
damage, say A. Thangadurai and M. Arumugam, members of the Panchayat,
which has 11 members, and, remarkably, there is no president or any
other office bearers. Every decision is taken collectively by all the
11.
As we walk around the village, one notices that there is a public
reading room with a TV with satellite channels. An initiative of the
village youth, says Arumugam. Another thing that immediately catches
your eye is the newly-constructed embankment wall. Pattinacherry had
been susceptible to the sea washing in often so there had been a wall
there previously. When the tsunami hit the village, some of the deaths
had been caused by concrete slabs from the wall flying around due to
the impact of the waves. The new wall, about 10-feet high and made of
reinforced concrete and designed at the IIT, Chennai, the villagers
hope, will fare slightly better. It’ll be much more effective than the
previous one in preventing the sea coming in though they are not too
sure how effective it’ll be against a tsunami. But it does make them
feel a little more secure at night.
What does not make them feel so secure are the houses that have come up
on the government donated land nearby. A total of 454 houses have been
built, out of which 230 have been financed by the Mittal Steel Company,
N.V., The Netherlands. These houses were handed over to the government
in April, 2007. At the time the villagers moved in, in June 2007, they
didn’t have electricity or water supply. Electricity came only in
November. Six months later, sewage facilities are yet to come.
Everything just flows onto the street or into the neighbour’s backyard.
Glaring errors
All the houses have the bathrooms sealed up and closed because the
septic tanks have been built (unusually, buried three feet under ground
level) without the air ventilation pipes, making them unusable. More
alarmingly, not even six months old, huge cracks have appeared in many
houses, on the walls, near the foundation, on the roofs. We were taken
to see a house where a huge part of the roof, the concrete plastering,
had just collapsed, falling within metres of an elderly woman sleeping
inside. A lot of them now prefer to stay in their old mud houses
because they say it feels a lot safer and friendlier. Were the
villagers even consulted about the type of houses they would like to
have? Of course not.
The other lot of 224 houses, financed by Secours Catholic, France and
executed by the Pondicherry Multipurpose Social Service Society, seems
better designed and better built. These houses, handed over in
September 2007 to the government, are yet to be allotted or occupied
though.
Uneasy balance
No doubt about it, a lot has been done. Since life’s claims cannot be
denied, the people of Pattinacherry have picked up the bits and pieces
and moved on, attaining at least a semblance of balance. Dozens of
children alight from autos on their way back from the school in T.R.
Pattinam. More are cycling back. The Rajiv Gandhi Foundation is
building a two-storeyed school, almost complete, in the village itself.
But even today, that hard-won balance lies a little uneasily on the
shoulders of the villagers because much of what has been done has also
been done a little too casually and cavalierly. And that is something
they don’t deserve, not after what they’ve already gone through.
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/12/23/stories/2007122350100400.htm
Copyright
© 2007, The Hindu.
