On the morning of January 26, 2001, people in the western state of Gujarat were only just waking up to celebrate the biggest national holiday in the Indian calendar - Republic day - when the ground shook for a terrifying 45 seconds. The worst earthquake in India's history tore through the region, flattening hundreds of towns and villages, claiming more than 20,000 lives and rendering millions homeless. The reverberations of this massive earthquake - measured at 7.9 on the Richter scale, more powerful than the one that rocked Haiti last week - was felt as far away as Pakistan and Nepal.
Despite its legacy of death and destruction, the earthquake set a milestone in the history of disaster response not just in India, but around the world. The lessons learnt in post-disaster recovery and reconstruction are still used as case studies to offer a measured response to disasters like Haiti. What followed was one of the biggest reconstruction programmes ever undertaken in India. According to a World Bank estimate, the earthquake caused damage worth US$4.5 billion. Gujarat is one of India's more economically prosperous states but the region where it struck - the district of Kutch, where 90 per cent of deaths and asset losses occurred - is known to have a high poverty rate.
"What the Gujarat earthquake taught us - is that investment in local people and local responses is always the best option," said Dr Unnikrishnan PV, the emergencies expert at the time for ActionAid, an international aid organisation. One of the first people Dr Unnikrishnan remembers meeting in the zone was 12-year-old Nancy Takkar. She had watched her school collapse, burying 300 children under the debris. There were many traumatised children like her. Some 15,000 primary schools - half of all those in the state - were damaged or destroyed by the quake.
In a bid to restore normality, it was important to get them back into classrooms, even if in tents, said aid agencies. "We couldn't wait," said Maria Calivis, the head of Unicef's India office in 2001. "We cannot overstate the value of a school in helping a community to recover." The first spaces cleared by the bulldozers were set aside for classrooms. Just days after the earthquake, 80 teams of health workers from Unicef fanned out across the earthquake zone to vaccinate 14,000 children under the age of five against measles, a disease that could spread rapidly among children in cramped relief camps.
More than 1.1 million buildings collapsed because of the quake. In the months and years after, entire towns and villages had to be rebuilt. In the reconstruction that followed, emphasis was laid on building earthquake-resistant houses and the Indian Seismic Building Code underwent a stringent upgrade so that future catastrophes could be averted. But more crucially, in many cases, the earthquake disaster was used as an opportunity to transform the quality of lives of impoverished people.
"Does an earthquake, natural or otherwise, shatter only walls and roofs?" says Nikita Sud, a relief worker from Care India, an aid organisation. "How about spirits, confidence, drive, aspirations, plans, hopes? How about livelihoods?" "After a disaster, it is not enough just to rebuild with bricks and mortar," Ms Sud added. "Rebuilding has to go much deeper than that." * The National