With tremors, like cyclones, seeming to intensify, how prepared is India for the ‘big one’, should it visit us?

I did not have to start. [Arthur C. Clarke] opened the conversation with the subject of the earthquake. “I have spent three weeks in Ahmedabad as a guest of the Sarabhais,” he said, “and so my sense of sorrow is all the greater.”

There is not much one can say in response to such a deeply felt remark and I was quiet for a long minute before asking Clarke if, in his view, we would ever come to the position of being able to predict earthquakes. “Strange, you should ask that,” he said with excitement. Wheeling himself to one of his bookshelves, he pulled out a squat volume. It was a book co-authored by him, Richter 10. Clarke autographed the volume, placed it in my hands and wheeled himself to behind his desk.

I turned the book’s pages and saw the novel opened with a dramatic forward: “Many years ago I was standing in a Delhi hotel when I became aware of a faint vibration underfoot. ‘I had no idea,’ I said to my hosts, ‘that Delhi has a subway system’. ‘It doesn’t,’ they answered. That was my one and only experience of earthquakes.” 

....

Clarke’s Richter Ten is fiction but not fantasy. Not for us in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan where the subcontinent’s pushing into upper Asia has not stopped. 

How many of us recall how many died and were rendered homeless in Latur (1993), in Kutch (2001) or even in the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004)? And the one of 2005 which left 79,000 officially dead in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and 1,500 in Jammu and Kashmir, and more recently, the one that all but flattened Nepal (2015, 8.1 ‘Mercalli Severe’)? 1

New Delhi is receiving political and architectural attention for a major overhaul of its official buildings. New Delhi and much more seem to be receiving seismic attention as well that could do more than overhaul. But if not yet predictable and certainly not preventable, that seismic plan can yet have its impact blunted if we think and act betimes. 

  • 1. We are not to get alarmed. But we are to be alert. And that includes short-, medium- and long-term action. The short term requires that vulnerable buildings be identified and plans for their occupants’ safety made. The medium term requires that a new architecture regime be made mandatory for all builders and developers. The long-term action has to include a de-congesting of our cities. If South Africa can have one political capital, another legislative capital, a third judicial capital and a fourth business capital, why should we not think of such a dispersal at the Centre and in the States ? And it has to include a clear-eyed survey of dangerous densities, vulnerable heights, clogged accesses.