Editorial
Cyclone Aila, a year on
A scandalous rehabilitation failure
IT is deeply embarrassing to speak of Cyclone Aila a year after it claimed lives and left homes destroyed in the southwest of Bangladesh. A full year after the disaster, there are yet tens of thousands of people who remain homeless and still live on the embankments or raised ground in the area. It is here that a sense of outrage comes up. It was only to be expected that with a disaster of such magnitude, all out efforts would be made to rehabilitate those affected in the quickest possible time through making such rehabilitation a priority on the part of the government. Natural disasters anywhere arouse a high degree of attention on the part of the authorities, to a point where the machinery of administration is swiftly deployed to roll back the damage caused. Unfortunately, in the case of Aila, that sense of importance has clearly not been there.
The time is now here for some hard and harsh truths to be told about all the efforts that have been made or not made about helping Aila victims get back to a normal life. What surely exercises the mind and is certainly inexcusable is the fact that tenders related to the repair of damaged embankments were not called before November last year, a good six months after the disaster had struck. When as many as 213 kilometres of embankments were fully damaged and 1,128 kilometres were partially damaged, one quite does not fathom why such an inordinate delay came into the repair process. Indeed, as many have suggested (and it is something we cannot disagree with), the task of rehabilitation and repair should have been done on an emergency basis. That is the standard rule everywhere in case of such all-encompassing tragedy. Why our authorities did not consider Aila serious enough to warrant placing the affected areas under emergency is a question no one has answered, much to our shame. The consequences have naturally been predictable: a number of major points along the embankments remain unrepaired. And with the monsoon approaching once again, we can all expect a worsening of the miseries of those who are yet without roofs over their heads. And, of course, there are too the sad tales of many victims who have simply moved out of the area in search of shelter, a condition that cannot quite be described as congenial.
Questions of emergency handling of the situation aside, there are some very serious worries about the way in which the Water Development Board and the contractors employed to repair the embankments have gone about their work. In July last year the WDB announced a plan of repair, which plan was then shelved aside in September. It was then said that a new plan would lead to a repair of the embankments by December. Nothing happened. In November the WDB invited tenders.
The long-drawn indifference to the need for a quick reconstruction of the embankments now imperils the entire region once more. Such a cavalier attitude will not do. Those responsible must be held to account as the repair of the breaches in embankments is completed before the monsoon gets into full flow with the residual vulnerable people relocated elsewhere.
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