A junior airport official asked a team of doctors from Indore to pay him Rs 1 lakh to arrange a godown for storing the huge stock of medicines they had brought with them. Representatives of a multinational telecom company were asked to take permission from the IT Secretary to use the over 100 wireless sets the company had donated for relief work. A French plane carrying 40 doctors and 7 tonnes of medicines and relief material was made to hover in the air for nearly four hours only because the officials did not know whether to divert it to Ahmedabad, Bhuj or Bachau. All this as people were dying and time was running out. His experiences made him remark that besides a lesson in disaster management, politicians and bureaucrats would do well with a lesson in humanity.
Extraordinary situations call for extraordinary actions.
For once official procedure should have been given a go-by to aid the relief operations. Red tape should have been the last thing to have frustrated the efforts of relief missions. There may have been several ignoble acts that went unreported. What makes us believe we may not be the next in line, anxiously awaiting any form of relief. Why do we think the man standing before his collapsed house and wailing over his loss can never be us.