India Must Learn from Haiti

The scenes being flashed around the world from Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, are terrifying and tragic in equal measure. The earthquake on Tuesday - 7.0 on the Richter scale - is proving to be a humanitarian disaster of staggering proportions. As of now, the casualties number in the tens of thousands; a hundred thousand by some accounts. But as rescue operations proceed, this number is bound to increase. A Haitian senator estimated a final death toll of five hundred thousand, in a country with a population of just nine million. A disaster of this magnitude will and should prompt questions regarding mitigation and response plans, not just in Haiti but elsewhere. We, for one, would do well to look within at the potential for similar disasters here.

And that potential is high. The Indian subcontinent is prone to dangerous earthquakes with five having taken place in the past two decades. The latest surveys indicate that about 60 per cent of the country is at some risk of experiencing an earthquake. With the country divided into four zones denoting various levels of seismic activity probability, several major metropolitan centres - Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, to name a few - lie in areas of moderate or higher risk. Extrapolating from the devastation in Port-au-Prince and in previous earthquakes in India such as the one in Latur, the loss in terms of life and property if one of these far more densely populated areas were to be hit could be devastating.