RN Mohanty: leading relief efforts in Tamil Nadu and Kashmir

3 January 2006

In both instances, Mohanty’s job was to set up relief operations in the first few weeks following the disaster. Here he explains what it was like working organising CARE’s relief effort immediately following the tsunami and how it compares to his recent experience of staging a relief operation in the aftermath of the earthquake in Kashmir.

“When the tsunami struck, I was holidaying with my family in Pondicherry, an old French colony which is now an Indian union territory in the middle of Tamil Nadu state. Our flat was very close to the sea, but luckily we were all asleep and none of my family were on the beach. We were disturbed by tremors and we ran outside. We never suspected there had been a tsunami. We discovered what had happened only when we saw it on TV.

Just a few hours after the tsunami hit I got a call from our Director of Emergency Response in Delhi asking me how soon I could be back in Chennai to start up relief operations. Luckily, Pondicherry is only a couple of hours away. We packed our bags and left at once.

On the way to Chennai, we drove along the coast. I could see people crowding the highway at various places and I stopped a few times to talk to people along the way. People were talking about the force of the waves and how many people had died.

Organising a relief operation

The first thing CARE did was to organise a rapid assessment of the scale of the damage and what was needed in affected communities. My colleagues flew in from Delhi. We had to set up temporary offices in a small hotel in the city because we did not have an office in Chennai. In less than three days, we had estimated the number of families affected and what they would need to overcome the immediate effects of the tsunami. We helped meet the basic needs of approximately 100,000 women, men and children (20,000 households) in Tamil Nadu by providing temporary shelters, water purification materials, culturally appropriate clothing, sleeping mats, sheets, soap, school kits and other essential items.

The first few days of the tsunami response were very stressful. We purchased supplies and arranged for them to be transported to the affected areas. We also bought some supplies locally so that we could deliver the relief quickly.

Reaching the people in need

Because we wanted to make sure we were reaching the people who most urgently needed the supplies, such as old people and people with disabilities, we could not simply load the items on to a truck and then offload it on the other side. Instead, our field staff issued relief cards to families in advance of the trucks’ arrival, ensuring that the relief was distributed fairly and based on need.

We also wanted to make sure that we were reaching the most vulnerable people first. This meant that we had to work out which communities had suffered the most damage and who were least likely to recover from the setback. Thanks to our field officers, about one-third of our beneficiaries were dalits, the ‘untouchable’ caste that have the least resources within Tamil society.

I was very pleased to learn from a women beneficiary that we had been particularly thoughtful about the type of relief we were sending. CARE was distributing sari blouses and petticoats along with the saris to women survivors. She was so grateful because she had lost all her clothes and would not have known how to wear the sari without these essential underclothes. I thought of our women staff in Delhi who had undoubtedly insisted on the blouses and petticoats, and silently thanked them for their foresight. I knew that many of them had been working late into the night to support our efforts.

Planning the next phase

By mid-January, CARE had already constructed 500 temporary shelters. Soon after relief operations were in full swing, we began planning the next phase of our work. We knew we had to build more shelters and complete our relief distribution to ensure that affected families were housed safely and that their basic needs were met. But we also needed to tend to people’s long-term needs, building permanent houses, improving water and sanitation, temporary and helping people who lost their income in the tsunami get back to work. I left Tamil Nadu on the 27th of January after handing over charge to the next team leader.

The earthquake in Kashmir

One similarity between responding to the tsunami and the recent earthquake was that we had no prior base or field presence in either Tamil Nadu or Kashmir. This is always a challenge because in emergency situations there is very little time in which to make assessments and decide on the most appropriate course of action.

Overall, it was much tougher to mount a response in Kashmir than it was to set up operations for the tsunami. The villages were very high up on the mountains. Many villages were completely cut off because of landslides, so we had to depend on helicopters to airdrop materials. We also had to race against time because we knew that winter was fast approaching. Already nighttime temperatures were close to freezing point. We had to complete our distribution quickly so that families could benefit from the warm clothes and blankets as soon as possible. In that first month CARE delivered relief materials to 7,500 families in two of the worst affected areas – Uri and Tangdar. In Kashmir, CARE had to maintain a very neutral stance as an agency interested in delivering aid and not involved in the politics of the region."