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Friday, 2 February, 2001, 17:51 GMT
India quake: Mike Wooldridge in Bhuj quizzed
![]() The BBC's Mike Wooldridge is in Bhuj, the epicentre of the earthquake and the hub of the relief operation. He answered your questions in a live forum.
To watch the forum, select the link below
Transcript:
In the second part of the question he asks how people can rebuild their lives - people, and particularly in India, seem to do that for themselves. They need of course external technical help to do this - they need building materials for those who are moving back into apartments in the bigger cities - these buildings need to be reconstructed. For a long time people are destined to live in tents at best - at the time being they don't often even have those to live in. So the process of rebuilding their lives is going to be very difficult. It will depend on their own ability to find work again. Many people have lost jobs as a result of this, their place of work has collapsed along with the earthquake. Once people do have a chance of getting back to work - for many that will be a very difficult task - they will need help with that as well. I think a lot of people will pick up the pieces of their lives from their own resources but at the same time they will clearly need considerable help. We are talking about thousands and thousands of families here.
Often those who are giving their money do indeed prefer to see it given in material things - they feel that it is easier to trace what will happen with it. But it doesn't necessarily mean sending those things from abroad - it can often be better to buy them within India.
In the past there has been a history sometimes of cash going astray in all sorts of countries of the world - but that monitoring process is one that is becoming sharpened and I am sure we will see that that is the case here.
I would suggest that any individual look at the track record of the agency to which they are making their contribution. This is sometimes no easy to do but I think this is a role for the media to report how agencies are spending their money and to report if there are any examples of misuse.
But the scale of this disaster was enormous. Even the Swiss, British, Russian rescue teams and those from other countries, would testify to the difficulty of being able to cover all the ground. Even they had to concentrate their efforts on the buildings where they felt there was the best chance of finding somebody alive. There had to be a concentration, they would say, on some buildings rather than others - every building could not be searched with specialist equipment however regrettable that may be.
There is one element that the central government is looking into as to whether there was a further slowness of reaction because it was Republic Day and because the authorities were caught up in preparing for the Republic Day ceremonies. As time goes by, and the judgements are levelled more acutely at the machinery of government, they will come under increasing scrutiny.
The official count for bodies actually recovered stands at around 14,000 - but there are many, many people under the debris. We simply don't know how many people are under the debris. It is very credible that the death toll could be somewhere in that range of say 50,000 to 100,000. I think it is extremely hard to narrow it down beyond that at this point.
Pakistan has sent this aid at a time when both sides are struggling to find a way to restart their official dialogue on the basis of the cease fire that is in effect at the moment in Kashmir. Certainly the Indian Government, once the aid arrived, welcomed the gesture and obviously that must be a step towards what could potentially be an improvement in relations between the two countries.
The relief efforts did spread quite rapidly out beyond the towns into some of the villages as well. The larger supplies, on the larger trucks, weren't perhaps getting too far off the beaten track. But even within Bhuj there were complaints of unequal distribution of aid and to a certain extent I think that is true. I would say one week on from the earthquake that that is the real challenge now to distribute the aid more equally between the town and cities and the rural areas.
Perhaps as I said in answer to an earlier question - it might be good to look at the track record of a particular agency. They might also want to put the chosen agency on the spot and say that they want their money to be spent on the rehabilitation of the victims. The best agencies would be only too willing to do this.
In the longer term they will need help in getting jobs - that is more difficult for people to contribute to but they can ask which agencies are working in helping people get back on their feet. They also want medicines of course - there are people with injuries from the earthquake and people who are vulnerable to illnesses that arise because of the conditions in which they are now living.
Many people have moved out of the area for the time being. There will be many relief camps - they will be under tarpaulin. It is extremely important for the public to keep up the pressure on people in the media to continue reporting the conditions in which people are living and on the aid agencies.
There are always aftershocks - we have been feeling them when travelling around the area - the largest has been 5.9 on the Richter Scale and that was a pretty severe one. Those aftershocks have made it more difficult in some cases to carry on the relief work - they have also increased the anxiety among those who have survived. This has also encouraged the exodus from the area.
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