Kerala, After The Flood: Pragmatism, not false pride, should govern India’s stand on foreign aid

Editor’s note: Described as one of the worst since 1924 by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, the rains in Kerala have left over 350 dead and rendered thousands of people homeless. According to the latest tally, 80,000 have been rescued so far. Over 1,500 relief camps have been set up across the state that currently house at least 2,23,139 people. In a multi-part series , Firstpost will attempt to analyse the short-term and long-term impact of these unprecedented floods on the lives of the people, economy of the state, and the environment.​

For more than a year, they had been trained to live and work in hell — but no hell they had imagined was quite like this.

Four-storey reinforced concrete buildings had been ripped out of the earth and deposited yards away. A 30-metre fishing boat was found a kilometre inland. Light aircraft and cars were heaped in piles at the local airport, as if tossed by a giant. Nine hundred of the town’s 6,500 residents had been killed by the great tsunami that surged out of the northern Pacific in 2011. Led by commandant Alok Awasthy, 46 Indian rescuers from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) spent weeks in northern Japan’s Onagawa, digging through rubble 10 metres high — even as other foreign teams fled, fearing radioactivity from the destroyed Fukushima reactor, just 75 kilometres away.

Little was recovered from the debris — seven bodies and ¥50 million in cash that roughly amounted to Rs 30 lakh — but India’s first international overseas disaster operation won the country respect among the community, and across the world.

Now as India struggles with the catastrophic floods in Kerala, foreign disaster aid has again become an issue with India unwilling to accept the help it then gave. In 2005, as countries across the region struggled to cope with the Indian Ocean tsunami, India declined aid. Then prime minister Manmohan Singh’s decision was intended to signal that the country that had begun pushing for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, was a power to contend with.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi initially welcomed the United Arab Emirates offer of $100 million in emergency aid for Kerala — a state whose workers have helped author that country’s economic success story. Foreign ministry officials, however, pushed back and India instructed its diplomats to politely decline foreign governmental aid. UAE prime minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum responded by lamenting the existence of officials who ‘suggest actions that make human life more difficult’. “Their happiness,” he wrote, “is that people need them and stand by their doors and their desks”.

He’s right: The price of the pride that underpins India’s decision is human life.

Kerala’s disaster response has won admiration in and outside the country. Within hours of the floods hitting the state, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan began holding twice-a-day meetings, where officials were assigned tasks and their progress reviewed. A control room was put in place, bringing together military and civilian authorities. Local panchayats were used to distribute aid, through networks of community volunteers unprecedented in their scale.

“Frankly,” an NDRF official told Firstpost, “I’ve never before seen a relief operation in our country where aid was not being pilfered by local bigwigs. Nor have I ever seen so many volunteer to serve their communities.” But as the emergency response gives way to medium- and long-term crisis management, the state is going to be severely tested, and not just to find the estimated Rs 39,000 crore needed for reconstruction.

Kerala has a relatively small public sector. The state’s economic review records that the government employs some 2,75,000 people and another 1,25,000 are with quasi-public institutions, to serve a population of 34.8 million. The state police, notably, has just 39,159 members of personnel — 113 for every lakh persons — or less than half the United Nations-recommended 250 per lakh.

Although institutions from the Niti Aayog to the World Bank have hailed what Kerala has managed to do with these resources — its healthcare and education levels are the best in India, exceeding those of far richer states — the data suggests the government will be hard-pressed to find the personnel and resources needed to administer long-term relief and reconstruction. Even though Kerala has succeeded, with the help of institutions like the NDRF and the armed services, in riding out the emergency phase of the floods, it will need large amounts of help to rehouse the more than five lakh people still living in camps and to repair civic infrastructure.

To do that, India needs to accept help from its friends — as even the wealthiest sometimes do.

Following the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a staggering 90 countries held out offers worth a combined $854 million. The United Arab Emirates alone pledged $100 million in cash and another $400 million in oil. Bangladesh promised $1 million. Thailand, which lost 8,150 people in the previous year’s tsunami, offered a team of 60 doctors and nurses. Even Cuba — subjected to sanctions by the superpower for decades — said it was willing to send 1,100 doctors.

The US accepted some offers, like flood-water pumps from Germany, and the services of dyke design experts from Holland. But many were rejected, mainly because they weren’t perceived as immediately useful.

For example, Greece’s offer to send two cruise ships for emergency accommodation was rejected since they would have taken four weeks to arrive. Indeed, 54 of the 77 proposals from the US’ closest allies — Canada, Israel and the United Kingdom — were rejected.

There’s little doubt the foreign aid refused by the US could have improved the lives of tens of thousands of people, many of whom remained homeless years after the hurricane. The money could, for example, have paid for the construction of an estimated 8,500 homes, or substantially helped rebuild the $1 billion worth of transport infrastructure claimed by the hurricane.

“In all humanitarian crisis,” says former diplomat Vivek Katju, “the criteria for accepting aid should be whether it’s needed to alleviate suffering, not some false pride or national ego”. Every rich country — from Japan to the United States — has accepted aid where its own resources were wanting. From the Nepal earthquake of 2015, to multiple crises in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and even Pakistan, India has held out aid to people in desperate need. New Delhi even gave a $25 million cheque to Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, which that country, churlishly, declined to encash.

But truly great nations, it is time India’s leaders realise, don’t just know how to give but also to receive.