(Politicians and the bureaucracy controlled by
them!)
Be it any type of calamity – droughts, floods, earthquakes,
tsunamis, landslides, cloudbursts – the scope of corruption gets magnified with
the scale of the disaster – bigger a disaster, bigger is the lure for the
politicians and the politicians-controlled bureaucracy to earn ‘some’ more
quick money – and with changing times, this ‘some’ has changed monumentally, dramatically,
to become millions and billions of Rupees.
Such is the scale of corruption in the rehabilitation
projects in the aftermath of a huge natural calamity that the Asian Development
Bank had to call a meeting of the representatives from the worst hit countries
of the Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004 to address the issue
corruption in relief and rehabilitation efforts. India was one of the countries.
We recently saw the sorry visuals on TV channels of an
Uttarakhand government official deputed for the relief exercise loading the
relief material in his car for personal use. We also read how some senior
ministers and politicians of the state and elsewhere misused the resources
(choppers and rescue time) for their disaster-tourism to gain political
mileage. Looking for such selfish gains when people are in imminent dander of
losing their lives is also an unpardonable act of corruption.
It is common to read satirical pieces on how politicians
and bureaucrats celebrate droughts, floods and other natural calamities. After
all, to corner away the funds meant for the public use, one needs to create the
outlets to siphon off the funds first. Natural calamities give them the
readymade outlets.
While massive flash floods like the Uttarakhand disaster
or tsunamis like the Indian Ocean tsunami or earthquakes like the 2001 Gujarat
earthquake, that are chance events, are avenues of bonus earnings for the
corrupt lot, droughts and floods affecting the larger parts of the country, are
the regular providers, year after year, of monumental under-the-table earnings.
Monumental yes, because a big disaster require billions in
funds to work out an effective rehabilitation action plan, and so ensure better
than handsome returns. Sadly, the action plan is made to look effective only on
paper so as to maximize the demand for funds. A parallel development to
maximize the fund value is to work out the distribution - who will get what
share of the loot.
Had it not been the case, the problems in managing the
droughts and floods would have been addressed decades ago because the
recurrence of droughts and floods in India is also decades old. While
the country witnesses large pockets of droughts and floods of large scale
almost every year, sometimes, these too become epidemic in scale like the Bihar
floods of 2008 or Maharashtra droughts of 1972
and 2013. Such precedents are aplenty.
The recurrence of natural calamities at bigger scale gives
the ‘men concerned’ ample space to manipulate; practices that result in scams like
the Rs. 70,000 crore irrigation scam of Maharashtra of the Bihar flood relief
scam of 2005 or countless other scams that happen year, in every part of the
country wherever a drought or a flood or any other natural calamity happens.
Huge returns with no input costs – politicians and their
administrative colleagues are loving it!
Disaster Management, here, so easily, becomes the personal
wealth management!