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Food-for-work program in India's quake-ravaged region

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February 7, 2001 

AHMADABAD- (AP) - With shovels, pickaxes and their bare hands, homeless villagers in western India will help rebuild their quake-ravaged countryside in an extensive food-for-work program, officials said Tuesday.

Authorities fear a mass exodus from the region if relief measures are not put in place soon. Free food being distributed to more than 30 million affected people was likely to end soon.

"After one more round of free grain distribution, there will be a food-for-work program," said P.K. Lahiri, principal secretary to Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel of Gujarat, the state worst affected by the earthquake.

"For now, the people are dazed since their trauma was so enormous. But we have to start offering whatever community work they want to do," Lahiri told The Associated Press.

He did not say when the food-for-work program would begin.

The 7.7-magnitude quake killed more than 17,000 people, and the toll is expected to rise to 30,000, said state Home Minister Haren Pandya.

Food-for-work programs were organized in India after a devastating cyclone that tore into the eastern coastal state of Orissa in 1999, and a severe drought, the worse in decades, in the western desert state of Rajasthan last summer. More than 10,000 died in the cyclone and millions were affected by the drought.

But such programs have not always been successful. Asked to cart and cremate bloated corpses for money in the Orissa cyclone zone, many villagers said they would rather go hungry than do menial labor.

Many turned away because they believed the dead belonged to Hindu castes lower than theirs and were therefore unclean.

During the drought, tens of thousands of villagers dug wells in the scorching sun in Rajasthan in a work-for-food program. They say few received their money.

It was not clear if villagers in Gujarat's disaster zone would also be asked to clear bodies and help in cremations and burials.

Authorities have ambitious plans to relocate thousands of people from devastated villages to new settlements, selecting sites and lining up material and equipment needed for the massive project. If this does not happen soon, villagers will flee the region, Lahiri said.

Construction of houses is to begin in April.

Lahiri said the federal government has promised to provide Gujarat with 100,000 tons of wheat which will be sold to villagers for 2 rupees per kilogram (about 5 cents per pound) - about a fourth the normal price in rural markets - if they take part in the food-for-work program.

"Right now it's free food. In the next stage, as we try to provide short and midterm solutions, it will be heavily subsidized food," Lahiri said.

Local media front-paged reports of government inefficiency in delivering relief supplies to far-flung areas, saying bureaucratic hassles were preventing foreign donors from transporting supplies from the airport in Ahmadabad, the state's largest city, to the disaster areas.

In the worst affected areas of Bhuj, Anjar and Bhachau, the town centers were flush with relief supplies and tens of thousands of people were being fed in makeshift tent homes. But in the hinterland, thousands of others waited in desperation for food, clothes and medical relief 11 days after the quake struck.

The U.N. World Food Program announced Tuesday it has launched a dlrs 4 million, four-month program to help feed 300,000 people - mostly pregnant women, nursing mothers and children.

With the immediate threat of epidemic diseases such as cholera abating, medical workers were focusing on preventing outbreaks of intestinal infections in the hardest-hit towns.

In Bhuj, the French group Doctors without Borders was concentrating on finding supplies of clean water - in wells - and distributing it.

Spokesman Jan Gustafsson said safe water was no longer much of a problem in smaller villages, but in the towns, where large water and sanitation systems were ruined, intestinal diseases were still a threat.

"If it's going to come ... it's more likely in Bhuj," Gustafsson said of an outbreak of intestinal infections.

More than 600,000 homeless people still lack food, clothing or sanitation. The injured number 66,758, Gujarat state officials said, estimating that 34 million of the state's 45 million people were affected by the earthquake.

A Gujarat state official said the damage is currently estimated at 208.75 billion rupees (dlrs 4.5 billion). The earthquake will hurt India's economic growth this year, but the government is hopeful the losses will be offset by growth in other areas, Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha said Tuesday.