Chemistry of Calamity
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashchandrabiswas@gmail.com">palashchandrabiswas@gmail.com
In pictures: Monsoon rains flood India
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_6270000/newsid_6272500/6272594.stm
Concerts to save Earth begin
Live Earth got a traditional Aboriginal welcome in Australia and a high-tech virtual one in Japan.
It was as the 24-hour global concert series to raise awareness about climate change kicked off.... >>>
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/default.aspx
Prakash’s attempt to see Nandigram from close quarters has resulted in the documentary, Nandigram: Aasman Ki Talaash Mein, released by the Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, N. Ram, in New Delhi on Friday. Several parts of Orissa and West Bengal were submerged in flood waters due to torrential rains in the last few days even as people in north India were looking skyward Saturday to get some relief from sweltering heat.The flood situation in southern West Bengal was grim as thousands of houses were washed away in four days of heavy rainfall affecting over 763,000 people.
As the state government called in the army, the death toll in flooding touched 27. Authorities said the situation was compounded with about 225 mm of rain in a single day in some areas.Stymied in the big US grain market, India will be scouring Canada and Europe for wheat cargoes despite surging world prices, as New Delhi scrambles to replenish stocks. In May, India sought to buy one million tonnes of wheat but backed ... The policy makers in India, working in accordance with the Global Order, are not worried of food crisis at all but Stymied in the big US grain market, India will be scouring Canada and Europe for wheat cargoes despite surging world prices, as New Delhi scrambles to replenish stocks. In May, India sought to buy one million tonnes of wheat but backed ... After more than two decades of eating China's dust, India is starting to pull closer to its sprinting neighbor. India's economic growth touched 9.2 percent last year, just short of China's 10.4 percent.The US has hailed India's recent move to withdraw the additional duty on beer, wine and distilled spirits, saying it was a positive step. "We are studying India's announcement to withdraw the additional duty on imports of alcoholic beverages. However,The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) on Saturday came out against the new mining policy, saying unrestricted export of iron ore and other minerals will cause grave national damage.
At least 25 people went missing today when their vehicle fell into a rain-swollen river in Rajasthan even as the flood situation in West Bengal worsened claiming 27 lives. The incident occured when the vehicle, a make-shift one for countrywork, fell into rain-swollen Thapi river in Jhalawar district, about 325 kms from Jaipur, officials said. While 10 passengers have been rescued, the fate of 25 others is not known. Heavy downpour battered several areas in Madhya Pradesh today paralysing normal life as swollen rivers and rain water inundated parts of Rajgarh and Khandwa districts, official sources said.
The CPI-M asked the government not to approve the mining policy prepared by a Group of Ministers or GoM but to place it before parliament for further discussions.
The CPI-M also sought a debate in parliament over the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) act.
"The issues concern protecting the interests of farmers, food security, changing the Land Acquisition Act, setting a proper ceiling on land allotted for different categories of SEZs, ending unjustifiable tax sops and protecting the interests of labour within SEZs," the politburo statement said.
A parliamentary panel that submitted a report on the SEZ act Friday expressed concern that giving away huge chunks of cultivable land for SEZs and other non-agriculture projects would have a huge impact on the nation's food security.
A co-passenger comrade reacted violently in Down BKP- Majherhat local train as we were discussing floods and waterlogging in Kolkata and Bengal. He blamed the centre for all the calamitiesas the Marxists have been doing all these years. He claimed that the depression phenemenon is such inthis part of world that the floods and water loggoing are almost destined.uling Left should not be blamed. He claimed that North India never has the same experience of Monsoon. He , posing to be a resident of Banaras claimed to be an expert of environment and ecology and said, not New delhi, not even the Himalayas Zone have to face such calamities!
I have written you earlier that tyhe Left Front has got autonomous grassroot level village to village organisational setup and it is impossible to dislodge them from there despite Nandigram singur insurrection. the latest development is that the ruling Left, particularly CPIM have successfully projectd the WB Governemnt as an instrument of urban and industrial development. Brand Buddha is in the best interest for Brahminical dominance in every sphere of life. Thus, the urban Bhadralok population and NRIs defend the left so vehemently. Some NRI friends pleaded for Buddha Dev from USA and UK. Mr Biplab Pal is amongst one of them who banned me in VINNOMAT, a yahoogroup!
A larger propoganda campaign is launched worldwide which is rather more effective than that of Mamata Bannerjee, Mahashweta devi, Medha Patkar and NO SEZ Campain altogether. They managed well Kolkata Media. Desh patrica publishes coverstories, Anand Bazar and all leading dailies edits and opinions favouring Buddha and rejecting opposition while Left Front Chairman Biman Bose is leading the misinformation sponsored campaign from USA. Editor of The Hindu, N Ram and a journalist like P Sainath also join the Left front camp.In HYDERABAD, CPI(M) Politburo member Sitaram Yechury has said that the tactics of Trinamool Congress to whip up social tensions in connivance with naxalites fell into a pattern being witnessed for the last two decades in West Bengal.Addressing a meeting here jointly organised by CPI and CPI(M) to mark the completion of the 30th anniversary of Left Front Government in West Bengal, Mr. Yechury said the Trinamool Congress presently and the Congress earlier, had been trying to establish their political authority in the State through terror tactics. This was a political conspiracy against the Government which the latter was determined to face. Both parties had taken up a campaign that industrialisation would be curbed as long as the Left Government continued in power. Their political objective was to prevent industrialisation by highlighting Singur and Nandigram violence. Otherwise, West Bengal was only behind Gujarat and Maharashtra in terms of economic growth rate.
The Chemistry of Calamity seems to be multi dimentional! The "truth" about inequality and inequality change can only be assessed through results of household surveys, and there are several organisations conducting such surveys in India. It is quite possible that all of these surveys just do not reveal the perceived "truth" about either inequality levels, or change in such levels. If that is the case, then no one can state with any conviction what the trends in inequality have been. And we can stop the discussion here. But we all have opinions, beliefs, and, most importantly, convictions. The common conclusion about inequality in India is that not only has it been worsening, but worsening sharply.
The recent angst expressed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on CEO salaries is an indicator of what is believed in important policy circles, and more generally, by the chattering classes. Not only are the rich getting richer, but horribly so. For evidence, commentators point to a similarly large developing country, China. It has experienced high growth, and a large increase in inequality.
Seeking a neighbourhood of peace and prosperity, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday said India does not wish to engage in an arms race with any one and would continue to maintain the highest standards of non-proliferation controls ...
Nandigram`s Rich farms
Nandigram is rich in soil, water and biodiversity, the real capital of communities. Each village has its ponds, making for water sovereignty. Each farm is a multi-functional production unit, producing paan, coconut, rice, bananas, papaya, drumstick and the richest diversity of vegetables I have seen or tasted. In fact , during our meeting, the village square blossomed into a farmer?s market ? with farmers selling four kinds of potatoes, eight kinds of bananas, gur (jaggery) made from date palm and palmyra palm.
The farmers? market like the one in Nandigram needs no oil, no Walmart, no Reliance, no middlemen. Farmers are traders, sellers and the buyers, all rolled into one. The market is self-organised. The community organises itself for trade. There is no government license raj, and no corporate control. This is the real free market, the real economic democracy.
The rich biodiversity of Nandigram supports rich productivity. In conventional measurement, based on monocultures, industrial agriculture is presented as being more productive because inputs are not counted, nor is the destruction of biodiversity outputs and the soil, water and air. In a biodiversity assessment, the biodiversity dense small farms of Nandigram are much more productive than the most chemical and energy intensive industrial farms.
http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/sundayitems.asp?id=SED20070706054216&eTitle=Issues&rLink=0
CPI-M working for MNCs,alleges fire brand leader Mamata Banerjee in Marxist base Thiruvananthapuram while At least six districts in West Bengal remained cut off from the rest of the country after surging rivers broke through mud embankments and swamped hundreds of villages.At least 700,000 people were affected by the floods in the state and thousands were being evacuated to higher ground, officials said.In neighbouring Orissa, some 1,000 villagers were rescued by soldiers in boats as water from the Subarnarekha river swamped 400 villages, affecting nearly 200,000 people.In Rajasthan, water breached a portion of a century-old dam, but authorities said they had the situation under control.
Kerala line of CPIM seems something different as the Marxist Chief Minister evicts Tatas from encroached land and WB CM puts everythin on stake for tata Motors in singur. Kerala denies Retail Chain while Bengal welcomes. marxists in Kerala welcomed BeerPutri Mamata with red flags! In another twist to its much-hyped demolition-cum-reclamation drive against land-grabbers in Munnar, the Left government today has reportedly decided to stop the demolitions. Government sources said the special task force there has been asked not to demolish but only file a case and seal a major unauthorized resort, which was to go under the bulldozers today. They said a decision has been taken “in principle” to make this applicable to the remaining unauthorized constructions there “so that possibilities could be explored for integrating the constructions into a master plan for the town later.” Though the sources said this move was also to avert inviting possible legal complications over land titles, a Left front leader feared that an abrupt stoppage to the high-visibility demolition exercise may be misinterpreted and go against the government’s image. No official word is yet available on the decision.
Chemistry of Marxism, capitalist development, promotor MNC Raj and disaster management is well expressed in Monsoon Havoc! Natural Eco system is destroyed with indigenous economy and culture under a political system led by feudal colonial comradors!
Nandigram and Singur are also flooded with rest of this subcontinent. But calamity is also unsuccessful to herald ceasefire and peace! The Civil war continues as the Eviction Rural India drive continues as well!
In Thiruvananthapuram, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee today accused the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) of working for the Multinationals.Lashing out at the West Bengal Government, Banerjee said the party had lost its ideology and was only working for money.Banerjee lashed out at the CPI(M) over the Nandigram and Singur issue saying the left party had lost its ideology and commitment to the people for the sake of money and power.Alleging that what had happened at Nandigram and Singur was "state-sponsored terrorism", she said the Left Front government had totally gone back on its promise to discuss the issue.
'They have lost their ideology. Money is honey for them. They are now battling for the multinationals,' she said.. She also said that the Singur and Nandigram episode were sponsored by the West Bengal Government. She maintained that her party was not against industry, but opposed the forcible acquisition of fertile land for the setting up of industries.
West Bengal witnessed sporadic violence over the acquisition of land for setting up a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Nandigram. Though months have passed since the violent incidents at the site, not even a proper charge-sheet was submitted and no culprits booked. The administration and the police were protecting the culprits, multinationals and big corporates while totally neglecting the poor who had lost their land, she alleged.
Her party was not opposing industries but forcible take-over of fertile multi-crop lands for creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), she said. Accusing the CPI(M) of following double standards, she said this was evident when the party decided to retain V S Achuthanandan as Kerala Chief Minister even after suspending him from the CPI(M) Polit Bureau.
About 60 people from Nandigram and Singur, including the kith and kin of victims, were also present and some of them narrated their experience.
The convention was attended by Communist Marxist Party leader M V Raghavan.
Meanwhile, the flood situation in West Bengal worsened on Friday, with the state Government being forced to called in the Army at Ghatal of West Midnapore district and Air Force helicopters at Sankrail to evacuate the marooned people.The army and air force swung into action to rescue marooned people in flood-hit West Midnapore district today as heavy rains have left 20 dead in nine districts of the state. Nearly 2,000 marooned people were rescued from the affected districts, including 350 from flood-hit blocks in Bankura district by the civil defence and the police, Finance minister Asim Dasgupta told reporters.
Army personnel in speedboats rescued 76 marooned people from Anandapur area of Ghatal, while IAF helicopters air-lifted people from Sankrail in West Midnapore district, Dasgupta said after reviewing the situation with Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee. More army personnel have been asked to rush to Ghatal, he said, adding the army has also been requested to rescue the marooned at Moyna in East Midnapore. The state government has sanctioned Rs 12 crores for rescue and relief operations in the affected districts of East and West Midnapore, South and North 24 Parganas, parts of Purulia, Bankura, Hooghly and Howrah and Kolkata.
About 6,500 persons were sheltered in 67 relief camps opened in the districts. Nearly seven lakhs people have been affected by heavy rains that lashed the state in the past four days.
In Kolkata, alleging inept handling of waterlogging in the metropolis, a group of naxalites today waved black flags and shouted slogans at Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya as he was visiting inundated areas of Behala in the southern outskirts.
The monsoon season in India usually lasts from June until September and exacts a heavy toll, both in terms of human lives and destruction of agricultural crops and property. The monsoon, which sweeps India from June to September, often causes flooding and deaths in the densely populated country of a billion-plus people. Floods are any high stream flow which overlap natural or artificial banks of a river or a stream and are markedly higher than the usual as well as inundation of low land. Sometimes copious monsoon rains combine with massive flows from the rivers, then the floods indeed become calamitous. Through geophysical studies, it has been found that more than one half billion people on our planet reside on river side and coastal flood plains where they produce 1/3 of world’s food production and on any day at least- some fraction of these plains go under flood water and hence causing widespread losses to human lives and heads of cattle dead, devastated homes, destroyed the agricultural crops and disrupted the communication links such as railways, roads as well as damage to health hazards. Even after the receding of floods it takes several months or even years before the community comes to the pre-flood level. So floods are a NATURAL AND INEVITABLE phenomenon of life in almost all the states of India.
According to officials and the Press Trust of India, five people have been washed away by flood waters in West Bengal, taking the toll in the past week in the state to 20 and nationwide to 655.The Press Trust of India also reported the western Maharashtra state has recorded the most deaths with 385. The deaths have been caused by building collapses, lightning strikes and drownings across India.Authorities say floods in eastern India have left nearly a million people stranded, as the nationwide death toll from torrential monsoon rains hit 655.
The state Government has set up 67 camps where 6,451 persons have been given shelter. The agencies involved have been able to rescue 2,000 people, who are now staying in these camps. In 24 hours, 200 mm of rain was recorded in East Midnapore, West Midnapore and parts of Bankura.
“The situation is grave and a cause for serious concern. Seven lakh people have been affected. We are working on a war-footing,” said Finance Minister Asim Dasgupta.
While Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is visiting West Midnapore district on Saturday to assess the situation, Dasgupta will be visiting East Midnapore district.
India's biggest communist party, whose support keeps the government in power, said it was working to create an alternative to the nation's two largest parties. The head of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), Prakash Karat, said the ruling Congress party-led coalition had failed to curb rising food prices and was not addressing the "agrarian crisis" while following unpopular economic policies.
"In that situation ... can we formulate a policy platform which is an alternative platform and then rally forces behind it? That is what the left is trying to do," Karat told Reuters in an interview.
But he said the left had no plan to withdraw support from the central coalition as it worked for a political alternative.
"We are in touch with many parties to agree to a policy platform and work with us ... on that basis, we can possibly see the emergence of a third alternative," Karat said in his spartan office in New Delhi. He criticised the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for food price inflation of over seven percent and failing to help rural people who were suffering from unemployment, sluggish farm output and farmer suicides.
"The UPA government has to pull up its boots and get something done in the next two years," said Karat.
National elections are due in 2009.
Karat said the government needed to implement an ambitious rural job guarantee plan, which envisages 100 days of employment for one member of a rural family each year.
PUBLIC INVESTMENT
He also called for more public investment in agriculture, which has been stagnating at around two percent for a few years. The widely watched Wholesale Price Inflation, which hit a two-year high of 6.7 percent in January, has been falling in recent weeks but analysts say pressure on food prices remains. Public anger against the Congress party over high food prices saw it booted out of power in two northern states this year.
"That is the ground reality ... the government is unable to provide relief to the people and simultaneously they have weakened or dismantled the public distribution system in most parts of the country," said the soft-spoken Karat, seen as a Marxist hardliner on economic policies.
The University of Edinburgh postgraduate said food price inflation continued to hurt the poor and middle classes and government needed first to look at the consumer price index rather than the wholesale price index to determine the correct level of inflation.
The CPI (M) and three other smaller parties, which generally follow its national line, have a total of 61 MPs in the 545-member Lok Sabha , and shore up the government of reformist Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The CPI (M) has 44 MPs in its fold alone.
Karat said the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the country's main opposition group, have less than 50 percent of the national vote, fuelling the CPI (M)'s efforts to present a new political alternative.
"There are many areas in which we hope to rally other forces and parties, who may not fully agree with the left programme."
"We are talking to a number of parties ... and getting some response now," Karat, 56, added, referring to common opposition to the government's plans to set up Special Economic Zones on farmland and New Delhi's closer ties with the United States.
Insight into missing dimension of Nandigram
Staff Reporter
http://www.hindu.com/2007/07/07/stories/2007070761031300.htm
NEW DELHI: For a directorial debut, Prakash Kumar Ray has been valiant enough to choose Nandigram killings and violence as a subject matter. He reasons it was important for him as a person to find out what really went wrong in the rural area and why the popular Left Government in West Bengal was in the news for the wrong reasons.
Prakash’s attempt to see Nandigram from close quarters has resulted in the documentary, Nandigram: Aasman Ki Talaash Mein, released by the Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, N. Ram, here on Friday. The film trie s to explore the events at Nandigram before and after March 14 — the day when 14 persons were killed in police firing and subsequent violence — and “see through the anti-Left campaign” in West Bengal.
The film captures the run-up to the March 14 tragedy; how the Trinamool Congress-backed anti-land acquisition platform, Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee, forced innocent people — several of them Communist Party of India (Marxist) cadres — to leave their homes and property; how the CPI(M) activists were attacked and killed; and how some of the complaints of people missing were fabricated.
“The Left has been helming the State for the past so many years. It has been a popular Government. So when the March 14 tragedy occurred, I could not believe what was happening in West Bengal. I knew I had to be in that area to find out the facts,” Prakash, a scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said after the screening.
“So when I decided to go there, I thought of taking my camera and other equipments along. Three of us toured the area from March 29 to April 6 to get a first-hand report. Of course, we used deception and were under cover all the while,” he added.
Calling it an “exemplary effort,” Mr. Ram complimented the director on “successfully breaking through the barrier and giving us an insight into the missing dimension.”
“It is quite an achievement. We need to put this in the right perspective. Many of us have been bothered about the March 14 tragedy but there was always something missing, a huge part, from the whole story that did not make it to the mainstream media,” he said.
“The film captures the complex situation and makes a powerfully successful attempt to fill some good part of the gap. What is shocking is the manufacture of consent for the indictment of the Left Government in West Bengal and demonisation of Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the CPI(M). All kinds of people landed there without any thought about the implications of what they were doing. There was just one-sided grief, completely ignoring the plight of 3,500 people who were forced to become internal refugees,” Mr. Ram said.
Floods
Torrential monsoon rains continued to wreak havoc in India's eastern and northern regions, marooning thousands of people and causing a dam to collapse, inundating several villages, media reports said Saturday. The Jaswant Sagar dam in the central region of north-western Rajasthan state collapsed after two days of continuous rains on Saturday, flooding 60 villages in the vicinity, the NDTV network reported. Officials said heavy rains in India's eastern Orissa state had triggered flash floods across the coastal Balasore district on Friday, as three major rivers overflowed their banks marooning 600,000 people, the IANS news agency reported. Officials in the neighbouring state of West Bengal said the death toll in the monsoon-driven floods had climbed to 20 and hit thousands of people in several districts over the past five days.
The army and air force were called to provide assistance in West Bengal, but bad weather has hampered relief efforts. In the state capital Kolkata, more than 100 people have contracted infections due to the rains, officials also said. The deluge has also left a trail of death and destruction in Gujarat state in the country's west, and in the southern states of Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.
Since the onset of the monsoon season this year, heavy rains and floods across India have claimed at least 270 lives. The Indian Meteorological Department has predicted heavy to very heavy rains at many places over Rajasthan, Orissa and West Bengal till Sunday.
The rains in the coastal districts have flooded 400 villages since Monday.
"All rivers are flowing above the danger level," Mortaza Hossain said, relief minister in West Bengal state, which has been hard hit by the rains.
"Rescuers have evacuated some 6,500 people."
The minister says the deluge has marooned almost a million people in 3,000 villages in coastal areas of the state.
Singur CPI-M worker remanded in judicial custody
Kolkata: A West Bengal court Saturday remanded Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) worker Debu Malik, prime accused in Singur girl Tapasi Malik's rape and murder case, in judicial custody for a fortnight.Malik was produced in the Chandannagar Sub-Divisional Court of Hooghly district where the judge remanded him in judicial custody till July 21.Malik was arrested last month by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for his alleged role in the murder of Tapasi Malik in Singur, about 40 km from here.The CBI also arrested CPI-M Singur zonal committee secretary Suhrid Dutta in connection with the case.
Ah, the Comrades!
Written by
V.Krishna Ananth
The CPI (M), among many other things, was known to hold on to a position that its central leadership adopted between two party congresses. In other words, party units across the country would follow the same line. This was pronounced in the case of the party's attitude to tackle the caste based discrimination; the party's units in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Tamil Nadu, for instance, refused to internalize caste into its action programmes and insisted, over the years, that class and not caste as central to their political agenda in these States and ended up remaining on the fringes of the political discourse.
The fact is that the founders of the communist movement in Kerala and in West Bengal had internalized caste and launched a whole lot of campaigns against caste-based-discrimination and the base of the communist movement in these states were and continue to be constituted by these movements and the social groups that rallied behind the communists historically. But then, the unified leadership of the communist party, after independence, came to be dominated by leaders from West Bengal and Kerala, for whom the stage was to launch class-based movements (only because the caste-class overlap was achieved in these regions) turned out to set the line for their comrades in such others states. And this dominance of one line caused a lot of damage to the communist movement in states other than West Bengal and Kerala.
http://indiainteracts.com/columnist/2007/07/07/Ah-the-Comrades/
Floods are considered by laymen as mainly resulting from the incapacity of the river to carry the increased volume of water in its course, and hence resulting in overland flow and causing inundation of neighbouring lands. A meteorologist considers it as resulting from abnormal increases in the quantum of rainfall during a short interval of time, generally in the catchment area. An hydrologist considers it as resulting from saturation of subsurface and the cross sectional area of the river not enough to carry forward the increased supply of water from the catchment area. A geomorphologist considers it as resulting from the channel geometry and the neighbouring landscape not being in equilibrium with the suddenly increased flow in the channel sometimes causing channel migration. An environmentalist invariably blames it on the destruction of natural vegetation in the catchment area causing soil erosion and increased overland flow. An engineer attributes it to the increase in bed load (silting) raising the bottom of the river bed over a long period of time and indicating the instability of the river to carry its normal volume of water, not to talk of the increased volume. An administrator is more often concerned about the effect of floods and devises plans to mitigate the sufferings of the affected. Thus it can be seen that the interest in the study of the floods and its effects is spread over a considerable section of the populace and it is no wonder that due to its devastating effects, the study is now receiving greater attention than before.
Floods depend on many things such as Climate, nature of the Collecting basin, nature of the streams, soil, vegetative cover, amount of snow melt and over all rainfall. Annually, the Indian land mass receives on precipitation of 88-89 cm with very high variation from region to region. In the state of Rajasthan, the rainfall is almost nil whereas in the state of Meghalaya, an average rainfall of 1000 cm occurred every year. So this variation in the occurrence of rainfall makes the country prone towards the situations like floods and droughts.
India is the most flood affected nation in the world after Bangladesh. It accounts for one fifth (1/5) of global deaths due to floods and on an average thirty million people are evacuated every year. So floods, in India are not a new phenomenon. “Unprecedented floods” take place every year in one state or other state of the country. The vulnerability of states or union territories of India due to floods was not observed severely in the past due to low developmental activities and population pressure. However, in the present time, unabated population and high rate of developmental activities forced on the occupation of flood plains and making the society highly vulnerable for flood losses.
Disaster management in India
by K. C. Gupta
After independence India began a process of rapid industrialisation. It inevitably lacked some framework conditions, such as an understanding of the risks of chemical hazards. Implementation of safety procedures, including regulatory approaches, soon followed and institutions such as the National Safety Council (NSCI) were created. There was much to do.
The Bhopal disaster (1984) did much to focus more attention on the need for a holistic approach to technology disaster management, and the role of ordinary people in emergencies. The government took several important measures, with major legislative changes and stronger institutional mechanisms. It set up Crisis Groups at central, state, district and local levels. NSCI took the APELL process as a model, promoting awareness and training projects covering both hazardous materials transport and fi xed installations.
India is also vulnerable to natural disasters. While well-established mechanisms for response, relief and rehabilitation were in place, major events such as the Orissa super-cyclone (1999) and the Bhuj earthquake (2001) emphasised the need for a comprehensive approach to mitigation and prevention, for natural and man-made disasters.
NSCI adopted several goals based on the APELL procedures: creating or raising public awareness of possible hazards within a community; stimulating development of co-operative plans to respond to any emergency that might occur; and e
