SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007 Edition

SO far it has been argued that the exclusion of poor and marginalised women, Dalits, minorities, tribals, and informal labour takes place in India because of competing claims over limited resources. There just isn’t enough for everybody so some people are left out. But the tsunami recovery process in coastal South India shows that even when there are almost unlimited resources we still find persistent exclusion, deliberate and by default. A comprehensive joint evaluation of the entire humanitarian response to the tsunami, under the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, found that “India is the only country where the share of aid commitments exceeds the share of long-term recovery costs”. From $13.5 billion worth of total commitments, India received 12.5 per cent, that is, $ 1.49 billion. Certainly these resources did not go to the Government of India or to Tamil Nadu but to a wide range of UN, international and local agencies. We do not only exclude victim communities from mainstream national development. We also exclude them from outright acts of charity and compensation after disasters.

The tsunami is no exception. Exclusion is deeply embedded in our disaster response. Many women, casual labour, minorities, tribals and Dalits were left out of the 1999 Orissa cyclone relief activities. Eventually, Action Aid had to launch a social audit to cautiously collect data on who received what and when. Sneh Samuday, or ‘care group’ was launched across coastal villages in Orissa to reach out to those who had been excluded. During the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, rated as the most successful recovery in the recent past and decorated with national and international awards, a local NGO Navsarjan and a local NGO network Janpath had to build houses for the Dalits and the salt farmers and their community groups who had been left out of the response process. After the 2002 Gujarat riots, minority communities, the major chunk of victims, were often ingenuously excluded from the government’s compensation by being offered unusable miniscule sums of Rs 170 or Rs 328 for lost shelters or other assets. As a result, after four years the Government of India had to declare a revised package and ask the Gujarat government to repeat their compensation assessment.

In the tsunami response, Christian Aid, an international NGO, hurried to work with CARE and the National Centre for Advocacy Studies to design and develop a ‘Social Equity Audit’ to again put the estimated 7 per cent to 12 per cent of Dalits, who had been left out among coastal communities, and urban scavengers on the relief to recovery agenda in South India. Almost all types of organisations exclude the most needy. It could be a UN agency working with labour or on food issues, or an international NGO with over 50 years of field presence in India, or a local NGO addressing human rights of the poor. A first time respondent or an NGO with long time government–NGO coordination experience can hardly stop the exclusion of social and economic groups in our response system. Media, however well meaning, often gets attracted to more dramatic acts of exclusion or discrimination in a particular location or community and leaves out widespread and persistent exclusion on the basis of caste, religion or occupation in bilateral projects. Similarly, international NGOs, unaware of local context and unprepared to touch local power structures, often bypass dealing with local power dynamics, such aselected panchayats or traditional Fisherman’s Panchayats. The local NGOs, without national reach and often with only a three month response budget, avoid inclusive relief in favour of timely and effective project delivery. The national government avoids issues ofexclusion in bilateral projects to maintain a more egalitarian profile among the international community of nations.

The multilateral agencies are dependent on the national government and cannot step aside and point out who is being left out and why. The international financial institutions have to finally wrap up a loan agreement and hardly ever take up such thorny issues in project planning and designing consultations. The state and its agencies are allowed to take over response and rehabilitation— what is really the domain of local communities and local markets. Now, if such a takeover was effective, it may be tolerated as a transient stage. But neither centralised planning nor top-down management shows that the recovery performance is anywhere near the desired levels. Depending on where you look for information, from 40 per cent to 60 per cent of tsunami victims are still without adequate and sustainable shelter. Additionally, data on livelihood recovery is impossible to gain as baseline data is rarely sought on to compare impact of recovery expenditure and control groups are seldom observed. This social exclusion is made invisible in official and civil society statistics by local authorities, international financial institutions and the global humanitarian system. The excluded are also made invisible in loss and compensation lists. As a calm but fiercely committed Mr Wilson from the Safai Karmachari Andolan, Chennai, active in 13 states points out in his ongoing study, ‘scavengers and safai karmacharis are hardly anywhere to be found in the recovery process,’ nor are they found in the up coming Rs 1,000 crore World Bank-funded tsunami shelter programme. Even district or state level coordination initiatives, increasingly in government– NGO cooperation mode, with excellent credentials, adequate funds, and unmatched advocacy skills, do not sufficiently contest this top-down and administrative approach that continues to exclude the vulnerable among the victims across sectors, locations, communities, and projects.

Though sustainability of any real mainstream tsunami recovery is based on local housing and labour markets, especially for the poor and excluded, the state agencies and civil society initiatives continue to avoid any intervention in it. Instead they provide a wide list oflivelihood support. They avoid any intervention in housing and construction markets but build thousands of temporary and permanent shelters. They also avoid any intervention in the local agriculture and fisheries market but almost endlessly supply boats and farm implements. The most valuable finding of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute’s (AIDMI) work in tsunami areas over two years in South Asia is not about who is excluded and why, but the fact that the excluded are demanding the right to be included. They are standing on their own feet and not on the crutches of civil society initiatives or government schemes. Exclusion, when repeated, produces twotypes of responses from the excluded. The excluded become more astute and find ways to organise themselves and access social and economic recovery benefits that are rightfully theirs. The other result of repeated exclusion is a more activist or militant responsewhere the excluded try to delay, derail or sabotage mainstream recovery with direct or hidden interventions. The first response flowers when civil society and its resources are available. The second response flares up when conditions are volatile. In any case, due to exclusion the incomparable energy of the victims to recover on their own is not available for rebuilding their own lives or the nation’s.So is there any hope? Is all lost? What really gives us hope comes from experiences in our July 2007 field work from Nellore to Rameshwaram. It is the initiatives taken by those who are excluded that are the most inspiring. Subjected to repeated exclusion from relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction and recovery processes, excluded communities are more and more insisting on their right to be included, in having shelter, a sustainable livelihood, fair compensation and freedom to make decisions.

Mr Muttuswamy of the Covenant Centre for Development, Madurai, who has been systematically building open organisations asserted that, “landless women are coming forward not only for compensation for lost days of farm work due to the tsunami but are also demanding a piece of land of their own to recover.” In the communities we visited throughout the tsunami recovery process there is no major evidence that the excluded have internalised exclusion, or that they have developed dependence on government or NGOs ormighty humanitarian organisations and agreed to submit to the exclusive mainstream recovery process. Asuntha from NESA, Pondicherry, a network of 130 local NGOs, gently repeats, “It is a question of human rights. The Right to Relief is inherent in human rights”. Acceptance of being left out is being rejected. Jesuratnam, a vocal and fearless leader of a 15,000 member fisherwomen’s federation called SNEHA, Nagapattinam, explained: “Coastal areas belong to all coastal communities: to the fishermen and resort owners as much as to those who collect crabs and sweep beaches”. Even after being sidelined in the tsunami recovery the excluded dowith grace, subtle sarcasm and a smile – ask to be included. Their hands were folded. Not in submission but in calm determination.

Mihir Bhatt is director of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute, Ahmedabad. Tony Reynolds contributed to this article.

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