Starting Over

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After a bulldozer has pushed aside the larger pieces of what was once a three- story housing block, a group of soldiers from the 111 Engineers Regiment climb in with shovels. The men brace themselves for the horrors that are sure to turn up: six days after the town of Bhachau was flattened by the monster earthquake that hit western India, there is not much hope of finding survivors under the mounds of concrete and brick. The overpowering stench of rotting human flesh hangs in the air. After half an hour of careful digging in the precarious heap, they hit the first of many corpses they will encounter today. "It is falling apart, sir," trooper Charan Singh reports helplessly to his major. More gently now, the men clear the rubble and extricate the blackened, decaying body of an unknown man, lay it on a stretcher and cover it with a white sheet.

Now volunteers take over, handkerchiefs tied over their faces and burning incense sticks. They carry the body to a hurriedly built funeral pyre, chanting Hindu prayers. It's backbreaking, soul-shattering work; some of the men, like 17-year-old Nirmal, had never even seen a dead body before today. "I think of these people as my own brothers or sisters," says the shy schoolboy from Surat. "No one seems to remember that they were human beings."

That's all too easy to forget in a tragedy of this scale—too easy to think of casualties as statistics rather than people. The numbers numb the senses. Last week Defense Minister George Fernandes, who is overseeing the relief operation, said the death toll from the 45-second, 7.7-Richter tremor might exceed 100,000. The Red Cross puts the figure at closer to 50,000, and local authorities in Gujarat state, scene of the worst devastation, estimate 30,000. The exact number may never be known: as the threat of disease mounts, more bodies are being hastily burned than carefully counted. In any case, the debate over the dead is being overwhelmed by the larger, more immediate task of caring for the living. Estimates of the people made homeless by the quake run into the millions. Hundreds of thousands are crammed into makeshift camps clustered around Gujarat's cities like Ahmedabad and Bhuj, and at least 200,000 are living out in the open, braving the winter chill huddled around small bonfires. (Many others, spooked by the aftershocks and fearing a second big quake, fled to elsewhere in India.) As rescue efforts give way to relief operations, "the most urgent need is shelter," says James Brown, who is part of a team of aid workers from Britain's Department for International Development.

Even those who can get under cover are desperately short of supplies, especially in the more remote hamlets. Destitute villagers must walk kilometers in the hot sun to meet social workers distributing food and water from trucks loaded up in the cities. At a camp in Bhuj, the women help volunteers to cook large cauldrons of rice and lentils, but many are still in a state of shock. A grandmother tiredly flails her arms shouting, "Run! Run!" She has been doing it for days. Neighbors explain that she is demented with grief: everyone in her family is dead.

It will take months to rebuild the broken homes and years to recover from the damage done in those few ghastly seconds. But the relief effort is inspiring— drawing thousands of unpaid workers from all over the country. Like no other calamity in recent years, Gujarat's quake has galvanized Indians into a frenzy of volunteerism: money, medicine and other materials are pouring in from countless impromptu collections. The most striking contribution has come from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu-nationalist group usually in the news for minority-bashing and cultural nationalism. rss cadres—like Nirmal who is burning the dead in Bhachau—are everywhere, distinctive in their uniform khaki shorts, handing out hot tea, directing traffic, setting up tents or clearing debris with shovels and pick-axes. Smaller batches of volunteers do what they can. Says Raju Rajgopalan a volunteer with a Madras medical team: "Since the government cannot seem to do this, it is time for non-governmental groups to network and create an organized crisis management system."

Organization, however, is exactly what is lacking in the massive relief exercise. There is no single agency to coordinate the volunteer groups. A Hungarian team of doctors arrived in the town of Bhachau last week to find that no one knew what to do with them. "They have gone off with their satellite phone to try and call the officials in Bhuj," said a man in the medical camp. "Good luck to them. I doubt they will find anyone."

The federal and state governments remain paralyzed by the magnitude of the disaster. Victims everywhere complain they haven't seen their local officials. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, meanwhile, has promised to set up a special team to manage future disasters. He also announced a 2% income-tax surcharge to help pay for the rebuilding of Gujarat, saying that although foreign aid was coming in, Indians should "bear the burden of this national calamity." Those bearing the brunt of it are beginning to look beyond the calamity. "Our past life has become history," says Deva Majo, a farmer from Shikra village near Bhachau, as he stares at the ruins of what was once a happy settlement of 2,500. "Now we have to start all over again."