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Magazine
The Tsunami and the aftermath
A village revisited
SUBASH JEYAN
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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.
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Photo: Subash Jeyan
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.
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