Report on the Tsunami: Kanchipuram District

Watching TV news in Tamil Nadu is like watching a soap opera. The current government is the ultimate in apathy, incompetence and villainy if you watch Sun-TV, the mouthpiece of the DMK party. On the other hand, it is the best administration and one which cares for the poor and downtrodden people and upholds law and order irrespective of rank if you watch Jaya-TV which is owned by no less than Jayalalitha Jeyaram, the current chief minister of the state. The truth is not even in the middle of these two extremes since both of them use their power to propagate myths about one another. It is thus that I got to distrust TV news in Tamil, which is practically the monopoly today of these two competing parties. One could of course watch Doordarshan which propagates the third myth that the Central Government is the most benevolent administration in the whole wide world when not singing the praises of Manmohan Singh and his coterie of people with less than stellar reputations.

The news reporting by the print media is equally bad. The DMK through several of its bigwigs controls a string of newspapers and magazines which publish stories that do not have the most tenuous link with truth. The ADMK, not to be outdone, publishes its own newspaper which makes no bones about its biases.

It was thus that we decided to investigate the tsunami on our own. The primary motivation for this was an urgent request from an US-based organization of Indian physicians that we should lay the groundwork for their trip to Tamil Nadu to help in the tsunami relief efforts. The ‘we’ consisted of myself, my brother and a friend involved with Maitri, a non-governmental relief organization based in Pune, Maharashtra. Seventeen days after the tsunami struck the coast of India, we set out from Chennai toward the south to look at the various fishing villages strung along the coast and find out what help was needed and how best to provide it.

We took the East Coast Road out of Chennai towards Pondicherry. Our first stop was at Panayur, a small town with a fishing village near it. We chose Panayur as our first stop because Maitri was doing some relief work there and we wanted to find out their impression along with stories from the villagers.

Panayur town itself is right on the highway but the fishing village is about a mile or so to the east down a rutted road. The fishing village consists of fishermen who are Hindus and middlemen who buy the fish and sell it in the nearby towns who are all Muslims. As we reached the fishing village, we could see a madrassa and after a couple of turns reached the village school where the Maitri team was camping.

We met with a woman who had returned to India from San Francisco who was leading the Maitri team. There were about five or six medical students who had completed their education and were waiting to hear about their internship/house-surgeoncy who were talking to the patients. Except for one transplanted Tamilian from Pune, nobody else in the team spoke Tamil the local language but a couple of the villagers who spoke passable English acted as translators for the doctors.

The doctors told me that the tsunami did not seem to have hit the village hard, that they could see no physical injuries, there was some psychological trauma from the sudden rise in the sea, that the primary problem was malnutrition and anemia caused by a severe deficiency of vitamin B-12 because of a diet that completely excluded any vegetables and that the older people suffered from the usual geriatric problems. They were planning to wind up their efforts at the end of one day and move on to the next village down the coast. Their opinion was that the village needed a full-time doctor who would provide free services and free medicines to improve the general health of the population, something that a relief organization is not equipped to do. Clearly, a team of US doctors planning to spend 3-4 weeks was not the answer either.

My brother was buttonholed by John Paul, one of the translators, who told him stories about the tsunami. He said that the water rose halfway to the top of the lamppost, that several fishing boats were washed away or destroyed and the fishing nets were also lost. Listening to this, I checked the buildings for the high water mark that would have been left behind by a flood and could find none. We were given estimates of Rs. 200,000 for a boat and Rs. 50,000 for a fishing net. As we stepped out toward the sea, our driver whispered to me to stay back.

It seemed that our driver was talking to a villager named Sharifuddin when we were talking to the self-appointed spokesperson. The truth was that water came up only to the ankle level and receded almost immediately. Government officials had shown up the next day and distributed Rs. 4000 to each household and a 100-kilo sack of rice. NGOs had also shown up and were distributing food packets twice a day. Sharifuddin’s opinion was that those who couldn’t afford even gruel once a day were now eating well and sitting on a six-month supply of food, something that they never had before. Our driver urged me to grab my brother before he did something foolish like start handing out money. So I set off toward the sea.

All the houses in the village are of brick-and-mortar construction except for one last row of thatched huts right on the beach. I noticed that the huts were not even tilted by the tsunami, let alone washed away and that the boats and nets were neatly arranged on the beach. Clearly, there had been a small increase in the height of the usual tide but nothing untoward had happened in this village yet the resourceful villagers, seeing the opportunity to make a quick buck, were spinning stories to whoever would listen. Using American idioms, I told my brother to hightail it out of the place fast as we were being taken for a ride.

We then stopped at a refugee camp by the side of the road at Periya (Big) Nemmeli. I stayed back in the car to watch the conversation between our driver and two passing youths. The young men were quite voluble that they had received timely help from the government in the form of cash and grains. They were also receiving food packets from various social service organizations. They were smelling faintly of alcohol so our driver figured that we were getting truthful information as it would be hard to fabricate a story when inebriated.

We then drove down the highway stopping at Kalpakkam, the location of the atomic power plant. The power olant itself is located about a kilometer from the sea with walls protecting it on all sides from intruders. The wall facing the sea was reportedly demolished in part by the tsunami. I didn’t take any video or photographs of the place for I didn’t want to be taken into custody and interrogated by the security force guarding the place and who are super secretive about it. Three persons in the Atomic Energy Commission’s township (to the south of the power plant) had been washed out to sea. Everything had returned to normal there and we were shown the high water mark on the buildings. It was just about two feet above ground level. However, the beach here is not wide at all and it was easy to see how somebody walking on the beach could have been easily swept away before they could run to safety in one of the buildings. A little bit to the north, there had been a major disaster with about 60 persons dead, some when a church where Sunday services were being held was hit by the tidal wave.

We continued on to Sadras where stands a Dutch fort from colonial times. The fort was undamaged by the tsunami. Our next stop was Parangi (Firingee) Pettai, called Porto Novo by early Portuguese settlers, which also did not show much damage. It was interesting to see for the first time towns one had only read about in history books and where so much of the early history of the colonial occupation of India and the rivalry between European powers was written. We returned to Chennai by way of Mahabalipuram. There were reports that Mahabalipuram was flooded but the shore temple there was protected by a wall of rocks; the debris from the tide left behind on the beach was visible.

On the way back to Chennai, we saw again several temporary shelters by the highway. Essentially, there are small fishing villages every mile or so along the coast and you could see that the folks from these villages had left their huts to seek higher ground. We stopped again at Periya Nemmeli and found that the relief work was being handled by the New Calvary Church. A truck loaded with relief supplies was standing there and people were being handed a 100-kilo sack of rice, daal, a stove, cooking utensils, a plastic bucket, mats, clothing, a water pot, etc. The truck had a big placard on its side listing what each person was eligible to receive so that there could be no hanky-panky in the distribution. I saw several make-shift huts with two or three sacks of rice in them. Two motorcycles left the area each carrying two sacks of rice; I wondered if these were real victims of the tsunami or they just bought the rice bags at less-than-market price for re-sale. Considering that these people also had received government relief within a day or two of the tsunami consisting of a sack of rice and Rs. 4000 in cash, I was surprised that the New Calvary Church was handing out more rice but that also explained the presence of more than one bag of rice in the huts. In the distance you could see that a couple of the huts were out of kilter though most huts were standing up straight. However, the fear of tsunami had forced these people vacate their huts and move closer to the highway.

Already red earth had been trucked to the area and a rough road had been laid by spreading and compacting the soil on the sandy beach. There seemed to have been no loss of life as most people were smiling and cheerful. An evening class was being conducted for the children by two young women who were explaining to the children the need for hygiene and environmental cleanliness. Normalcy of some sort was returning to the area.

Clearly, we had traveled through the area that was affected but little by the tsunami. Yet, government machinery had swung in motion with reasonable speed and started providing relief. It is said that in any disaster, there are four R’s that need to be followed: Rescue, Relief, Remedy, and Rehabilitation. We were too late to watch the Rescue part (which mainly would have consisted of collecting, identifying and burying the dead in this case but would have been minimal at least in this area anyway). However, the Relief efforts seemed to be proceeding well, both by the state government and by private agencies. Remedy in the form of relocating the villagers was also beginning to happen with temporary shelters erected and more permanent housing being planned. Rehabilitation, in the form of providing sustenance by helping them regain their lost livelihood would take some more time but was being planned by relief organizers.