Four-thousand-rupee relief
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COMMENTS 
The survivors of a natural disaster often find that relief is the second disaster to hit them. In this special report from Pattincherry near Nagore, Tamil Nadu, it is clear that the relief is going to the strongest, to those who already have enough
"Those who have"....One person I heard using the phrase was a 19-year-old girl called Lekia, in the village of Pattinacherry near Nagore. Lekia lost her mother to the tsunami. When we meet her, she is sitting beside some startling evidence of the wave's power: on the edge of a boat that was picked up and flung here, into the heart of the village, a good kilometre from the shore. By now, a week after the tsunami, Lekia has come to terms with her mother's death.
She talks to us about it, and her situation, and the way she sees relief happening, with an articulate passion. And she uses the phrase; words in Tamil that mean "those who have". We will hear it many more times.
Driving into Pattinacherry just ahead of us is a man called Srinivas. He is a solid-waste management consultant in Coimbatore and has driven here in his car to see how he can do his bit. He is not part of any relief team or organisation, just a concerned citizen wanting to reach out to tsunami victims.
Srinivas has clearly thought a great deal about disasters. For he has a lot of ideas about how to respond to them bubbling out of him. He shares some with us as we walk around the village.
There should be a district-wise disaster management plan, he says. Non-government organisations and the government should coordinate in formulating it, as well as in implementing it when it is needed. Donated clothes, if they must come at all, must be sorted out -- by gender, by size -- before they arrive in the affected area. The government must have a plan in place so that relief can reach the same day or, at worst, the next. The first things to reach the area should be masks and bleaching powder, to prevent the spread of infection. Next on the list of priorities are torches, bedsheets, soap and dal. No clothes.
After 15 days, psychologists and motivators should visit; the idea is that mental rehabilitation is as important as anything else. Sheer physical strength is an issue too: voluntary organisations should send their teams to the weaker among the victims. They have a responsibility to get material to the truly needy.
Srinivas tells us all this with such a quiet intensity, in such great detail, that we are left with the impression I mentioned earlier: he has clearly thought a great deal about disasters. About how people outside the area react to them. About the impact relief has on people already devastated by the disaster.
And Srinivas uses the phrase too: "Those who have". Though he says it in English.
What he means is this: too often with relief it's those who already have enough who get more. Meaning, when a truck with relief material rolls into an affected village, given how haphazardly most relief workers hand out material, it's the strongest people who get most of it. Because they manage to elbow out the others and get ahead, sometimes reaching in and grabbing the stuff even before it's flung out. And each time it's the same people who stock up. Those who have. This is what relief too often does to people. This is why he has thought about it so much.
And already, travelling along the ravaged Tamil Nadu coast, we have seen the truth in this. Like in the settlement near Nagore where we watch two men drive in with a load of rice to hand out. Even before they come to a halt, villagers swarm over their vehicle, hands reaching in for the rice, reaching out to the men. For a while they do their best to hand the bags of rice out in some reasonable manner. But the bags are simply torn from them before they can impose any order.
Naturally, most of those who come away with bags are men, and a few sturdy-looking women.
So Srinivas says he approaches his personal mission of relief differently. He will drive into a village and first simply walk around for a long time, speaking to people quietly, trying to get to know them and the village dynamics. When he thinks he has identified those who really suffered due to the disaster, those who have missed out on relief ("those who don't have," you might say) -- only then will he return to his car, pick up a small amount of whatever he has brought and carry it personally to the homes of the victims he wants to help.
By now we are utterly impressed by this earnest, intense young man. And we see him carrying out his plan too: at one point he quietly goes over to his driver and directs him to take a few clothes -- new clothes, we note -- to a home 50 yards down a side street.
And then we meet Lekia.
Lekia starts telling us things that more or less confirm what we have heard from Srinivas. She describes a recent foray into Pattinacherry by a relief truck; how the men in it flung clothes and rice out; how "those who have" cornered most of it. She got none. Standing next to her, four of her friends corroborate what she is saying; two old men nearby do so as well. I listen with some sadness, remembering Srinivas but unable to think of anything I might say to comfort this distraught young girl.
Suddenly, Srinivas runs off to his car. He reaches in, then returns. In his fist he has a wad of 500-rupee notes. He puts Rs 4,000 -- yes, four thousand rupees -- into Lekia's hand and tells her it's for her to use as she wants. He also points her to his car and says: "I have a lot of clothes in there. Go over and pick out whatever you want."
I nearly have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming. In one stupid moment, this man with the sensible ideas has utterly changed the feeling around us, the dynamics of this little community. Lekia's four friends and the old men begin muttering. Then they ask me loudly -- they assume I'm with Srinivas -- why he gave only her money. Why not them? Then they start arguing with her. For her part, she announces just as loudly that she will not share with anyone. Carrying the notes and the clothes she has picked out from the car she steps carefully past them and into her home.
The astonishing thing is Srinivas is oblivious to what he has done. He turns to me and says: "Lekia had some very correct things to say, didn't she?" I tell him: "I wish you hadn't given her that money." His face crumples and he begins saying, "Sorry sir," to me, over and over again, I'm not sure why. But there's no way to retrieve the situation, so we walk away. Srinivas has done his damage.
The way of relief. The attitude of relief. What Nityanand Jayaraman called in this space some days ago, "the pathology of giving," even the "greed of giving". Travel to a disaster area and watch relief happen; you will end up with many agonising questions. And this is the result of the best of intentions, the most transparent goodwill. And it happens even with those, like Srinivas, who have clearly given thought to precisely these issues.
Fred Cuny -- a thoughtful Texan expert on relief who died in Chechnya in 1995 -- once wrote: "For the survivors of a natural disaster, a second disaster may also be looming."
Cuny meant relief. The thing is, we all want to help. Too often, in trying to do so we end up harming. Too often, that's how relief goes.
(Dilip D'Souza is an independent writer. He is the author of a book on the denotified tribes of India , and another on the impact of the Sardar Sarovar project on the Narmada river)
InfoChange News & Features, January 2005