As India celebrated its 72nd Republic Day, Gujarat mourned the 20th anniversary of the worst disaster that struck the state on January 26, 2001. Gujarat’s historic earthquake killed over 20,000 people, injuring 1,66,000, destroying nearly 4,00,000 homes. The shock waves spread over 700 km; 21 districts were affected and 6,00,000 people left homeless. While many believed that Gujarat would take years to get back to normal, the massive rehabilitation and reconstruction undertaken brought a resilient Gujarat back from the rubble. Bhuj, epicentre of the earthquake, managed to emerge strong after the disaster.
In fact, the pace of development in Bhuj following the disaster has been unprecedented. The town is now spread over 56 sq km - almost four times its size in 2001. It boasts high-rise apartments, sprawling supermarkets, beauty salons, recreation centres, wide four-lane highways, a modern earthquake-resistant hospital and an operational airport. Aid workers, global experts, journalists, corporates and religious groups of every denomination live in Bhuj today. Development banks and state governments have invested vast sums in infrastructure. Land has become an attractive investment. It is now common to hear Hindi spoken in Bhuj and hotels and cyber cafes complete to win the business of immigrants. If an earlier earthquake in the 19th century is thought to have encouraged many people to leave Kutch and settle overseas, then there is some irony in the fact that the 2001 earthquake brought thousands of people to the region.
Today houses have sprung up. Small but planned houses are being made by the quake-affected on their own but these follow the Government's development plan. As a result an altogether new city has come upon the outskirts of Bhuj, with wide roads and other facilities like gardens,a town hall and hospitals. Bhuj is set to emerge as a modern town.
People, of course, have conflicting views about the priorities of the rehabilitation schemes. Parvatiben Jani, who lived in a rented house before the earthquake, has just moved with her three-member family into a new, 35 sq m house in a colony of 200 houses built for the quake affected by the Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan, an NGO, in Bhuj's GIDC Nagar.
Says Jani: "As somebody who lived in rented quarters, I had a dream of building a house of my own one day. Ironically, the killer quake made it possible." Her happiness is contrasted with the comments of Sunil Anam, a bank official who has moved into a new house. "Housing and housing related infrastructural problems should have taken priority over roads and gardens," he says. "What good are roads if the quake -affected continue to face problems on the housing front?"
Yet, the model of rehabilitation in Kutch has won praise from experts who have worked in restoring quake-affected settlements in Japan, the US, Turkey and Iran. M. Greene, a rehabilitation expert with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, US, says the Bhuj reconstruction is commendable. "Even a country like America would have had problems with rehabilitation given the magnitude of the challenge," he says.
If an entirely new Bhuj has come up on the outskirts of the town, old Bhuj, a congested, 450-year-old township with narrow lanes and dense population, too has undergone a change. Take, for example, the Saraf Bazaar area where the lane was so narrow that it was difficult for two cycles to cross each other. The authorities convinced 500 odd shop owners that it was necessary to widen the lane keeping in mind the possibility of a quake in the future and they should, therefore, allow their shops to be sliced off. Today the road has been widened.
The Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority (GSDMA) has emerged as the key body in the rehabilitation of Kutch. It involved leading NGOs and reputed bodies like the IITs and the Centre for Environment Planning in the process of rehabilitation. As a result the approach to rehabilitation, unlike at many other places, was systematic and scientific. It was also people-focused, unlike in Latur, where people refused to move into houses built by government contractors.
The GSDMA also opted for a public private partnership. Thanks to this approach, 85 per cent of rural Kutch has got rehabilitated. But the Government's organised approach yielded quick results. While it takes 10 years to finalise a town planning scheme in the Indian environment, the blueprint for Bhuj was ready in three years. Now more industries have come up in Kutch. Prime minister Narendra Modi in December laid the foundation of India’s largest hybrid renewable energy park having 30 gigawatt (GW) capacity at Vighakot village in the district of Kutch. He said that the plant would provide employment to about 1,00,000 individuals and power produced from it would curb 50 million tonne of carbon dioxide emissions every year, which is equal to planting 9 million trees. This park will be spread over 70,000 hectares of land, equivalent to Singapore and Bahrain. About £15 billion will be invested in the construction of this park,” PM Modi said.
