untitled

“In a disaster, everyone is a victim in one way or another; no one is spared. We as

media are not there to merely and dispassionately report. We invariably become a vital

link between the scene of the disaster and the rest of the world.”

“The under-reporting and non-reporting of many human interest and human

development stories is a scandal. There are many silent emergencies that never attract

sufﬁcient media coverage or public attention…”

“As journalists, we've been trained to do quick, sharp and precise stories that will

have the most impact with our viewers. In doing so, we lose many nuances in a story like

the Tsunami.”

“If they want to engage the media, development professionals must ﬁrst understand

the complexity, nuances and diversity in what is collectively labeled as ‘media’. In fact, the

very term ‘media’ is a plural!”

“The priority of development organisations arriving at disaster scenes is not

primarily to communicate, but to respond to the emergency situation on the ground. This

frustrates many journalists. It is therefore necessary for development organisations to see

information as a ‘commodity’…”

These were among the many wide-ranging observations and perspectives exchanged

during an Asian regional brainstorming meeting held on 21 – 22 December 2006 in

Bangkok, Thailand, on 'Communicating Disasters: Building on the tsunami experience and

responding to future challenges'. Convened by TVE Asia Paciﬁc and UNDP, the meeting

brought together 33 leading media professionals, disaster managers and communication

specialists from South and Southeast Asia to probe the role of the mass media and

communication in times of disaster inspired crises and emergencies.

The meeting sought to discern the key communication lessons of the Indian Ocean

Tsunami (December 2004), Pakistan earthquake (October 2005) and other recent disasters

that impacted the lives of millions of people. It discussed both recent successes and failures

in timely communication using a range of information and communication technologies, or

ICTs.

Early on during the meeting, it became clear that both media practitioners and

disaster/development professionals had different attitudes and approaches to managing

information before, during and after disasters occur. Some of these arose from a failure

to appreciate the different needs and priorities of these two groups. Yet, this division

blurred as they agreed on the essential functions of information and communication,

and recognised the need to serve the public interest over individual, corporate or agency

interests.

The meeting agreed that the mass media must evolve their own ethics, guidelines and

strategies for covering hazards and disasters, balancing the public's right to know with the

right to privacy and human dignity of disaster affected persons. These cannot and should

not be imposed from outside. At the same time, greater understanding among media

practitioners, development professionals and disaster managers on each sector's needs

and limitations would engender more sharing and collaboration. The ﬁnal report of the

meeting, presented as Appendix 1 of this book, captures highlights and recommendations of

the Bangkok meeting.

The discussion on the role of information and communication in disaster situations

continues. Media-based communication is vitally necessary, but not sufﬁcient, in meeting

the multiple information needs of disaster risk reduction and disaster management. Other

forms of participatory, non-media communications are needed to create communities that

are better prepared and more disaster resilient.

The recent spate of trans-boundary mega-disasters in Asia and elsewhere offers a ﬁrm

reminder, if any were needed, of the increasing frequency and intensity of such calamities.

Climate change, which the scientiﬁc community now acknowledges as already unfolding

with far reaching consequences, will only exacerbate our vulnerability to new forms of

emergencies at national, regional and planetary levels.

This presents formidable challenges to governments, aid agencies, civil society and

the media. It calls for more strategic and collaborative approaches in our preparedness

and response. It also demands that we think and act beyond the conventional framework

of disaster risk reduction to take advantage of new technologies, methodologies and

opportunities.

Old and new ICTs -- ranging from telephones, radio and television to computers,

Internet and mobile devices -- can certainly play a part in responding to these challenges.

But success depends less on technologies, and more on policy, institutional and human

resource factors. After the Indian Ocean tsunami, Asia realised the inadequacies of existing

communications systems and arrangements in relation to hazard warning dissemination.

The region that leads the world in many areas of modern communications -- for example,

having the world’s largest TV audience and fastest growing Internet and mobile phone

markets -- failed to provide any public warning of the disaster.

As the Digital Review of Asia Paciﬁc (2005/2006 edition) noted: "Many of the

communities struck by the waves were hit about two hours after the earthquake that

triggered them. Anecdotal reports emerging in the aftermath of the catastrophe told of

isolated teams of experts who tracked the progress of the tsunami remotely but did not have

the means to raise the alarm among the communities that were in harm’s way. There were

also disturbing anecdotes of other experts who had forewarning about the tsunami but held

back from raising the alarm owing to apprehensions about reprisals from restrictive gate-

keeping regimes in case disaster did not occur."

The tsunami communication failures inspired much reﬂection in the global

humanitarian community. In the World Disaster Report 2005, the International

Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) made a strong case for a greater

role for information and communication in disaster situations.

The report argued: "Information is a vital form of aid in itself – but this is not

sufﬁciently recognised among humanitarian organisations. Disaster-affected people need

information as much as water, food, medicine or shelter. Information can save lives,

livelihoods and resources. Information may be the only form of disaster preparedness the

most vulnerable can afford. Yet aid organisations focus mainly on gathering information

for themselves and not enough on exchanging information with the people they aim to

support…”

Asia's recent experiences have shown how governments, civil society and aid agencies

mismanage information and communication, aggravating the agony of affected people

and wasting limited resources. There is growing recognition on the need for a culture of

communication that values proper information management and inclusive information

sharing. The 19 chapters in this book explore the different elements and combinations that

could help evolve such a culture in Asia, home to more than half of humanity.

Our 21 contributors -– most of them from Asia, and representing media, development

or humanitarian sectors -- do not engage in mere theoretical discussions. In 19 chapters

of this book, they draw on their rich and varied experience working in either preparing

disaster resilient communities or responding to humanitarian emergencies triggered by

speciﬁc disasters. Some are journalists who have reported on disasters from the 'ground

zero'; others are aid workers, public information ofﬁcials or development professionals who

have been at the forefront in emergency responses or are engaged in disaster risk reduction.

Diverse as their backgrounds and experiences are, our contributors share a belief in the

central role that communication can play before, during and after disasters occur. Within

this, they offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives as well as a great deal of practical advice on

how to communicate hazards and disasters at inter-personal, inter-agency, inter-sector and

public levels. The tools, technologies and methods may vary, but there is a broad consensus

that to be effective, communication needs to be two-way, inclusive, participatory and

sustained over time. It is not an 'add on' to other development interventions, but an integral

component in its own right.

This book comes out at a time when both the media industry and the global

humanitarian sector are undergoing rapid change. Our contributors are among the 'change

agents' leading or consolidating these changes, and thus able to offer insights from the

cutting edge in their respective spheres.

The proliferation of ICTs has enabled many forms of new media with higher levels

of interactivity and audience engagement than is typically possible in newspapers, radio

or television. This, in turn, has inspired a movement of citizen journalists who provide

independent reporting and analysis on many areas of public interest, including post-

disaster situations.

It marks the media's return to the grassroots where most stories originate and develop.

As Sir Arthur C Clarke, futurist and communication guru who has written a foreword to

this book, noted in an essay written in 2005: "Historically, organised and commercialised

mass media have existed only in the past ﬁve centuries, since the ﬁrst newspapers – as we

know them – emerged in Europe. Before the printing press was invented, all news was

local and there were few gatekeepers controlling its ﬂow. Having evolved highly centralised

systems of media for half a millennium, we are now returning to a second era of mass

media -- in the true sense of that term. Blogs, wikis and citizen journalism are all signs of

things to come."

The new media tools and platforms provide more opportunities for disaster affected

persons to directly voice their concerns, inﬂuencing how the mainstream media and

humanitarian players react to ground realities. For too long, media professionals and aid

workers have carried out their professional work with little or no meaningful interaction

with the affected people (sometimes called 'victims'). As we ﬁnd out in this book, the

affected people are not only asserting their place in the relevant discussions, but expressing

themselves using digital technologies ranging from mobile phones to grassroots radio.

The humanitarian community recognises this sea change and is reorienting itself.

While this book was under compilation, the United Nations Ofﬁce for the Coordination of

Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) convened the Global Symposium +5 on ‘Information for

Humanitarian Action’ in Geneva, Switzerland, from 22 to 26 October 2007. Representatives

from governments, aid agencies, non-governmental organisations, academia, private

sector and the media discussed and debated the state of humanitarian communication in

the digitally-empowered and media-rich world. Their statement (still in draft as this book

went to press in November 2007) attempted to deﬁne a common vision of the central role

of information and communication in support of effective humanitarian preparedness,

response and recovery.

It noted: "Information [and knowledge] has always been a key element in humanitarian

action but recent emergencies and disasters have demonstrated how vital its role is in

providing a basis for effective and informed advocacy, decision-making and resource

allocation for affected population as well as humanitarian actors. Timely, accurate [and

independent/objective/impartial] information is central to saving lives and strengthening

recovery; the power lies in its effective management, analysis and application…"

What does all this mean to a reporter or aid worker who is thrust into the midst of

an unfolding humanitarian emergency, challenging all professional training and norms

that work well under 'normal' circumstances? How can a community development worker

or school teacher add elements of disaster risk reduction to their regular work, trying to

raise awareness and preparedness at the local levels? And how can everyone enhance their

capacity to listen, reﬂect and learn -- essential steps in good communication?

This book does not claim to provide all the answers, but we hope it has at least

raised many pertinent questions. Instead of trying to be comprehensive or deﬁnitive, our

contributors are being provocative and imaginative.

As editors, we have resisted imposing our heavy hand on their diverse styles of

expression, allowing a free play and free ﬂow of ideas. Thus, the book reﬂects the plurality

that is characteristic of both the mass media and wider communication processes. If this

comes across as a cacophony as a result, that is as intended.

This book is aimed at media professionals, disaster managers, development workers

and civil society groups across Asia -– in short, all who share an interest in using

information and communication to create safer societies and communities. We hope the

contents of this book challenge and engage them in ways that expand their horizons.

My Chilean friends didn’t bat an eyelid

when I asked, “Do you know what it means

when the sea rushes back?”

“Oh,” they replied matter-of-factly. “It

means you have to run away -- and fast!

Maremoto (tsunami).”

I thought I was sharing new and relevant

information with them, given the global

impact that had just been created by the

tsunami of 26 December 2004 that severely

hit ﬁve countries of Asia -- India, Indonesia,

Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar. But then

I found out that all schoolchildren in Chile

are taught this and are thus familiar with

tsunami warnings.

Chile, after all, has a 6,435-kilometre

coastline and has suffered massive damage

from the earthquake-tsunami of May 1960. It

has experienced 28 great quakes measuring

more than 6.9 on the Richter scale.

So, while Chile might be continents away

from Asia, that conversation drove home

a point – that information can indeed save

lives. In contrast, many of the people near

Thailand’s beaches that December morning,

except for some indigenous peoples familiar

with the sea, were fascinated by the sudden,

rapid retreat of the sea and rushed into the

water seconds before the killer waves came.

A natural disaster usually comes as a surprise, as

the December 2004 tsunami was for many countries,

but the real story does not end there. A disaster is

usually deﬁned and reported by media as an event. In

reality, it is also a process, which means the complete

story goes much beyond the deluge of column inches

and soundbites about immediate damage, destruction

and the must-do anniversary stories.

Today, over two years after the tsunami that killed

nearly 230,000 people, how much do we really know

about the communities and countries it affected? The

stories were saleable in the weeks and months after

the tsunami. Freelancers fanned out across the region,

because disaster makes journalists sit up. But the

usual deﬁnition of news also means that the media’s

attention span is limited.

The tsunami slid down the news ladder as the

big international camera crews packed up, as the

immediacy of the disaster faded. Soon, in the usual

news parlance, nothing much new was ‘happening’.

How communities are coping, somehow, often seemed

to be less newsy that describing death, or churning out

the latest numbers of the dead and injured.

In a global information society where there is a

constant race for who delivers the news ﬁrst, such

news undoubtedly ﬁll a need -- the need to know.

But does reporting on disaster, conﬂict, international

politics or other issues, throw up other questions

beyond ‘what happened’? Questions like: What does

this mean? How did this happen? How do other

communities cope? Are the funds being put to good

use? Is the kind of assistance coming in sensitive to

different communities’ needs? Which communities are

left out from receiving aid and why?

These are some of the questions that beg to be

delved into, and are the niche for media organisations,

whose mission it is to try to look at the bigger picture

and put the issues behind the events in context.

This is not to say that some are always better than

others. It is a way of stressing that ‘media’ are

far from a homogenous crowd, and that different

media organizations have different media products,

stemming from different assessments of their

audiences and mission.

How many ways are there to report on a disaster?

I use examples from Inter-Press Service (IPS), a

development news agency for which I am director for

Asia-Paciﬁc, to do a post-mortem of sorts in the spirit

of sharing the challenges of covering disasters like that

of the tsunami and of learning from one another.

On 26 December 2004, I was in Manila, the

Philippines, for the year-end holidays when the

newsbar across the screens of international TV

networks began ﬂashing reports that “scores” were

believed to have been killed by a tsunami in the

Indian Ocean. It was, we were told, triggered by an

undersea earthquake recorded at up to 9.3 magnitude

on the Richter Scale. (This has since been called the

second most powerful earthquake ever recorded by a

seismograph.)

In the following hours, the number kept rising

– ﬁrst to “hundreds” then to “thousands”. Even

without much detail and description, it was clear this

was quite a different disaster. News desks around the

world went into action.

The editor for my region was on holidays in Africa.

So I was in touch with our regional correspondent,

who was then on holidays in Sri Lanka, and also in

contact with a regular contributor from Colombo, as

well our correspondent in India. We agreed on a few

story angles, trying to focus not on what had already

been reported and added little to the avalanche of

stories out there, but on how, for instance, the effects

of the tsunami interplayed with the ethnic tensions in

Sri Lanka.

A look back at the coverage on the IPS wire --

ipsnews.net -- at that time shows two different kinds

of stories in the days and weeks after December 26.

Some were more obvious, predictable ones, and other

more contextual ones that, regardless of where they

were ﬁled from, hew more closely to the news agency’s

mission of trying to provide reporting that explains

– and not only records what is happening.

Our Sri Lanka stories were among the richest,

consisting of reporting from different datelines from

areas affected by the disaster. Some articles, such as

one from Batticaloa, looked into how the tsunami,

which killed over 38,000 people in the South Asian

island nation, was bringing temporary rapprochement

among ethnic groups that had stayed away from

each other despite a three-year ceaseﬁre between the

government and Tamil separatist rebels.

In a January 2007 story from Sri Lanka, the

same contributor, Amantha Perera, follows how

rehabilitation is going on some years after the

disaster. (“Life is almost normal,” says Mohideen

Ajeemaat, whose home has been rebuilt.) But amid

such successes, the writer documents the concern

that the areas worst-hit by the tsunami, in the north

and the east of the island nation, appear to have been

grossly neglected at the cost of better rehabilitation

and reconstruction in the Sinhala-dominated south,

leading to charges of discrimination and political

patronage.

Other past IPS stories on the tsunami that

complemented straight news reports at the time

include one from Geneva, moved the day after the

tsunami. It reported how the tsunami showed, once

again, the lack of an early warning system for such

disasters.

From Washington was a piece saying that while

the world rushed to pour aid to the affected countries,

very few were focusing on calculating the long-

term economic cost of the tsunami. There were also

subsequent articles on how the tsunami highlighted

and exacerbated the discrimination that Burmese

migrants experienced in Thailand.

In retrospect, some stories could have added

more to what readers already knew. Some articles

contributed from Thailand fell into the trap (and

shortcut) of quoting mostly Western tourists who were

victims -- and left out local interviewees. This was

also signiﬁcant, given later complaints, both in media

in and out of Thailand, that international reporting

appeared to give the impression the lives of foreigners

was more than important than that of locals, and that

foreigners’ deaths made bigger news.

The pressure of deadlines does not make reporting

on disasters easy, especially for a development news

agency.

It was certainly a challenge for news organisations

that could not easily send hordes of journalists

into other countries or places. But like other media

organisations with the same aim of trying to cover the

other side or present other angles, the tsunami was also

a time to take a second look at how we do the news.

It’s not that news agencies like us cannot cover

fast-moving news, because we have been doing it for

decades. But the difference lies in the creativity and

skill in ﬁnding the relevant, the different angles, the

not-so-obvious viewpoints and the ones we might

ﬁnd if we stepped back and scratched the surface a

bit more. After all, our news lens was never meant to

consist of by-the-second reporting, but contextualised

reportage that seeks to help audiences understand and

feel the human story behind the event.

Certainly, though, there are a lot of media groups

that continue to report on the after-effects of the

tsunami since 2004, even if the space that these

articles and TV material occupy are these days much

less than at the height of the disaster.

Our contributions to this effort also include a

special series from the tsunami-hit areas in 2005,

coordinated by IPS Asia-Paciﬁc with the support of

ActionAid International. One series, produced by

Asian journalists who applied for these reporting

slots, was released around the sixth month after

the December 2004 disaster. A second one invited

applications from journalists from tsunami-affected

countries to report on another tsunami-hit nation,

to do stories linking the two and learning from each

other’s experiences in disaster management and

prevention.

Issues relating to tsunami-hit areas remain quite

deﬁnitely in IPS’ regional news priorities. However,

more can certainly be done.

For instance, this could be achieved by

designating speciﬁc writers to follow issues around

the tsunami as a beat – not one designed by

country or geography, but by issues such as aid and

accountability, means of rehabilitation, disaster

prevention and management. This conscious effort

to stick to the tsunami story – resisting fully event-

driven coverage -- could be one way to ensure

intelligent, consistent reporting with a view to coping

with disasters and contributing to their prevention in

the future.

Meantime, the December 2004 tsunami may

have ended, but its story continues.

As the magnitude of the situation seeped in, I

shuttled between TV, computer and cell phone, seeking

news, information, ways to help, anything. News there

was, aplenty. But nothing about how one could help.

I had been exchanging SMSes with Rohit Gupta,

founder of an online collaboration project I was part of;

it struck us that the best thing we could do would be to

collate information, put it all together in one place and

tell people about it.

Collaboration was the only way to go: no single

person could do this. I quickly set up a blog

Blogger’s web publishing service; it was free, familiar,

permitted multiple contributors, and simple to learn.

I put up a post stating our broad intentions, and we

began hunting up information, simultaneously inviting

bloggers we knew to join us.

Dina Mehta, inﬂuential blogger and online

acquaintance, was one of the ﬁrst to jump into the

effort.

Dina and Rohit were contributors on World

Changing,

a highly-regarded blog. They posted there

about TsunamiHelp, as we called our blog. One of WC’s

members, in turn, tipped off Boing Boing,

who linked

to us. I had mailed Prem Panicker, then Managing

Editor at Rediff

in the US; Rediff’s coverage also

immediately began to feature a link to us. From the

Sitemeter

counter I had plugged in, I noticed that

from the few hundred initial visitors our mass mailings

brought in, we were now getting thousands every hour.

By the next day, the New York Times and the

Guardian had written about us, and put our URL

in their articles, and the BBC’s site linked to us as

well, listing us as a reliable resource. Many other

news organisations followed suit.

Google put a

(unprecedented) Tsunami Aid link on their home

page, and linked to us from their dedicated tsunami

page.

Bloggers and webmasters linked to us by the

thousands. Trafﬁc, as a result, was overwhelming: over

a million visitors in the ﬁrst eight days. Our mailboxes

were bombarded with offers to help, and the team grew

rapidly.

The group self-organised over email, SMS and

instant messengers. An email list

became the main

channel for group communication; instant chats and

conferences

happened via Yahoo! Messenger.

From everyone trying to do everything at the same

time, the team evolved sets of duties.

“Janitors” cleaned up posts; “Monitors” checked

information that readers were leaving for us; “Linkers”

ensured that data stayed current; a few of us worked out

a system for answering questions from the Press; those

with the right contacts networked with NGOs and aid

agencies.

Someone came up with the idea of using Flickr and

its tags to help the Missing Persons effort, and quickly

set up a Flickr pool.

Others set up a working-group

page that tracked what needed to be done, and who was

doing what, on space donated by SocialText.

Some

took charge of creating versions in other languages. A

designer corrected my ham-handed initial template,

then created a new design, much easier on the eye, that

organised the information far more efﬁciently.

There was fevered discussion about what exactly we

were trying to do. News organisations provided much

better hard coverage than we could hope to. Wikinews,

in its ﬁrst real test as a news source, was doing a sterling

job of newsgathering via collaboration.

What was missing was a single repository of

information about who needed help at ground zero.

We hastily, but formally, deﬁned our task: collate news

and information about resources, aid, donations and

volunteer efforts. We set some ground rules: no politics,

no opinions, steer away from controversy, just ﬁnd

out about and link to aid efforts. Some of us felt that

“Tsunami Help” as a name ignored the earthquake that

caused the tsunami, so we renamed the blog “the South-

East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog.”

The blog grew. And grew!

Then, we discovered that while Blogger made

collaboration easy, it had serious limitations: no native

way to classify posts; no comment moderation or

comment-spam protection.

Soon, searching within all

those posts got confusing for us, its creators. How much

more difﬁcult would it be for a reader anxiously looking

for something speciﬁc? The work-around: split the

content into focussed sub-blogs. Teams began copying

content into Tsunami Enquiries/Helplines/Emergency

Services, Tsunami Missing Persons, Tsunami News

Updates, Tsunami Help Needed and Tsunami Help

Offered.

Someone suggested that a wiki

was a better

vehicle. But so many organisations and individuals

were already directing trafﬁc to the blog URL. Moving

base would mean extra clicks for visitors. Besides, not

everyone was wiki-savvy. So, instead of moving to the

wiki, we made it a parallel effort. Initially, we were part

of Wikinews, but the administrators there had issues

with is.

To end the squabbles, Dina paid to register

a domain name, tsunamihelp.info, Rudi Cilibrasi

provided server space, and a team of wiki-adepts began

categorising and copying content from the blog.

I have never quite ﬁgured out precisely how

many people chipped in to help. Sure, you could tot

up the contributors listed on the blog’s side panel,

the IDs and IP numbers on the wiki, the newsgroup

subscribers, and wind up with more than 200.

That’s just part of the story. Help came from

everywhere -- Asia, Europe, North America, South

America, Australia. Veteran bloggers, designers,

geeks, poets, lawyers, executives, academics,

teenagers, foodies, lit-lovers, database wonks,

wikians, stay-at-home moms; they put their lives

on hold and mailed in information, blogged,

commented, wikied, sorted data.

Each time we needed something done, someone

stepped up with the knowledge and expertise,

and just did it. Solutions were improvised, and,

somehow, it all worked. We kept each other

motivated, encouraging one another to get some

sleep, some food, some relaxation, while ignoring

similar exhortations directed at ourselves. No one

was indispensable -- willing hands took up the slack

whenever someone had to leave.

Food? Sleep? These were dispensable luxuries.

Party invitations were declined without a whimper.

People apologised profusely for the time it took to

commute between work and home PCs.

For those of us who worked independently, it

meant non-working (i.e. unpaid) time. The ones

holding down jobs juggled everyday tasks with the

SEA-EAT effort. I remember pinging our designer

about a display problem. “Give me a minute,” she

typed, “I just have to tell someone to go away.” She

spent an hour painstakingly tweaking the template,

and after we were done, I asked, “Who was that you

shooed away?” She typed a smiley, and added: “My

boss.”

One member excused himself brieﬂy just before

midnight, December 31. A few minutes into 2006,

he was back and blogging -- he’d just popped up

to raise a toast to the New Year with the folks in

his apartment. Another calmly and competently

took over tech coordination when others burned

out. Another spent huge amounts of time online

though she had to make crucial preparations for an

upcoming wedding: her own! Another didn’t sleep

for several days, fuelled only by rice, coffee and

adrenaline.

But it wasn’t all good vibrations. With the

frenetic activity, frayed tempers, misunderstandings,

and blow-ups were inevitable. A potentially

interesting offshoot, ARC (Alert Retrieval Cache

designed to auto-post SMSes, sustained collateral

damage in one major conﬂagration. One overstressed

person began inundating the group with needless

email, a council of war took instant harsh decisions.

Opportunists promoting their own agendas had to be

curbed. Some of the unpleasantness still lingers.

Overall, it was difﬁcult to know where to draw the

line, and I’ll wager we erred as often as not. But work

continued uninterrupted, quality kept getting better.

What kept us going was the knowledge that in some

small way, we were helping.

Side by side, another effort was taking place.

Many of us were also members of Chien(ne)s Sans

Frontières, a mediawatch blog. Some of the members

in South India and Sri Lanka were blogging, mailing

and SMSing from ground zero. Dilip D’Souza in Tamil

Nadu: “Don’t send clothes, they’re lying in piles on the

roadside.”

Four young Sri Lankans told us of morgues,

identifying corpses, burials in graves they helped dig,

of aid not getting to where it was needed thanks to

corruption and inefﬁciency. One of them, Morquendi

(an online handle), and I chatted online for hours one

night, he telling me matter-of-factly about the political

games, the risks he and his young friends were taking.

He was worried about them. “They’re so young,” he

said. “How old are you, Morq,” I typed. “23,” he wrote

back.

I brushed away tears several times that night, not

for the ﬁrst time in those weeks.

Did we do any good? Did we succeed?

We didn’t have a formal agenda when we started.

Some people did donate money. Others sent clothing,

food, medicines. Some volunteered in affected areas.

We had web expertise, we knew how to look for

information, how to make it user-friendly, we had

networks. That’s what we could give, and we did.

My friend Nilanjana Roy put it into words for me.

She said “It was your way of putting a candle in your

window, to show that you cared.”

Did we change the world? Did we make a

signiﬁcant difference?

From the emails, the sheer number of visitors,

from the links to us, from the media coverage, we infer

that we were able to provide valuable information at

a time when it counted. In our small way, we created

a little bit of internet history, pioneered a model for

successful online collaboration, a model that we, or

others, can reﬁne.

Some of the team stayed in touch, building

friendships on the strength of that month of working

together. We debated whether we should create a

formal organisation, document processes... but we’d

neglected the rest of our lives for too long, and these

thoughts ﬁzzled out.

I had begun to think that SEA-EAT was a one-

off, but I was relieved to see that when there were

a couple of subsequent earthquake scares in the

region, many of the team immediately got back in

touch and began updating the blog and wiki.

Then, on 26 July 2005, Bombay (Mumbai)

was hit by 944 mm of rain in one day. The weather

people called it a freak storm, a “cloudburst.” Parts

of the city stayed ﬂooded for days. People were

stranded in ofﬁces or on the streets. Residents

of ground ﬂoor ﬂats found themselves with their

possessions unsalvageable. Many lived through days

of water-logging, no electricity, phones or -- the

irony -- drinking water.

In the aftermath, a group of SEA-EAT alumni

and friends began to put together two blogs:

Cloudburst Mumbai concentrating on information

about the current situation, ﬂooding, news reports,

aid efforts and the like; and Mumbai Help, a

resource guide not just for the immediate situation

but for future reference as well. (The URLs for these

sites, and others mentioned in this section, are at

the end of this chapter.) Out of these efforts, an

initiative called ThinkMumbai was set up, to look

at some of the city’s deep-rooted problems, and to

provide some aids for future difﬁcult times. That

effort went into a long hiatus, but a few of us plan to

revive it.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina smashed

into Florida.

Several days before that happened, as it became

clear that Katrina was likely to hit the coast, some

members of the SEA-EAT team had prepared for

action. Based on the SEA-EAT experience, the

team focussed on a wiki. The site logged a million

visitors in two days. Of course that’s largely because

this disaster was in the US; internet usage there is

of a completely different order of magnitude. The

team collaborated on a People Finder and a Shelter

Finder, and came up with innovations such as using

a Florida Skype

phone number as a call centre,

manned by shifts of volunteers in three continents.

In October 2005 an earthquake near the India-

Pakistan border resulted in major losses of life and

property. Again, many members of the SEA-EAT

and CSF teams, plus others from the MumbaiHelp

effort, got together to try and help out. There

wasn’t much info available; it is a remote, hostile

landscape, without much infrastructure. The team

went back to a blog as the centre of the effort, and

attempted to create a system where SMSes could be

sent direct to a blog, which didn’t quite work out.

In December 2005, as that awful year drew to a

close, Bala Pitchandi and Angelo Embuldeniya came

up with the idea of a Memorial Week that would try

and bring the world’s attention back to the victims and

survivors of the year’s disasters. Our campaign got a

lot of support across the web.

Around the same time, we realised that starting a

new blog or wiki each time something bad happened

meant establishing credibility and search engine

rankings anew. We decided to bring it all under one

umbrella, the World Wide Help (WWH) group. We

post alerts and warnings to the WWH blog (and,

by now, with our links to NGOs, world bodies and

relief agencies, we’re able to keep tabs on potential

crises pretty efﬁciently); and if a situation looks like

becoming a major disaster, we then look at creating a

focused resource.

We used the WWH blog during the ﬂoods in

Suriname in May 2006, posting a combination of news

reports, translation efforts, on-the-ground reporting,

and information from relief organisations. The blog

continues to be updated whenever needed.

In July 2006, around the time I was writing the

original version of this essay, seven bombs went off in

Bombay trains during the evening rush hour, killing

181 people, injuring another 890.

The city was in chaos; suburban trains, the major

commuting artery, stopped running; thus roads were

jammed too. As rumours and panic spread, everybody

seemed to be trying to call everyone else at the same

time. The phone network -- landlines as well as

cellular -- were overwhelmed, so huge numbers of

people got no information whatsoever, which only

fuelled the confusion.

Family and friends in other parts of the world

frantically trying to make sure their loved ones were

safe only added to it. Some of us turned to the web

for answers, and MumbaiHelp came back to life,

with a ﬂurry of emails, ﬁrst-person reports on road

conditions, hospital numbers, and more. And, just in

case I had begun to think I was becoming a bit of a

guru on this online relief thing, the crowd taught me

something new. One post, titled “How can we help

you?” got a few hundred comments that night. The

comment area became a de facto forum, with worried

people leaving names and phone numbers of relatives,

and others popping up to make calls, send SMSes and

conﬁrm that yes, your brother, your friend, your aunt,

was indeed safe.

And so we’re the best thing that happened to the

Web, right?

I’ve heard talk about how SEA-EAT and

subsequent efforts have outdone big media. I don’t

believe a word of that.

We did get a lot of attention, and that, let’s make

it clear, was thanks to the media. Did we supplant

traditional media? Heavens, no! Our biggest successes

in terms of readership were SEA-EAT, which got a

million visits in about eight days, and the Katrina wiki,

which got that much in a day. For the big media sites,

those ﬁgures are peanuts. None of them is trembling

in fear of bloggers yet, I’ll wager. Citizen journalism

-- or at least the segment that we of WWH specialise

in, online relief aid --supplements the efforts of the

media, of formal relief agencies, of government bodies.

But here’s the thing. There was a week on the

cusp of 2004-2005 when a million people didn’t ﬁnd

what they wanted anywhere else. When Katrina hit,

a million others couldn’t ﬁnd the information they

needed elsewhere that day. When the bombs went off

in the Mumbai local trains, 40-50,000 people didn’t

ﬁnd what they were looking for in the media. We were

able to reach out a hand to them, in our small way. We

lit our candle, and showed we cared.

An earlier, much longer version of this essay

appeared in Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence, (Eds:

Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ravi

Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Awadhendra Sharan and

Geert Lovink) produced and designed at the Sarai

Media Lab, Delhi and published by the Centre for the

Study of Developing Societies, ISBN 81-901429-7-6.

More information and free downloads at http://www.

sarai.net/publications/readers/06-turbulence.

Nilanjana S. Roy ﬁrst pushed me into writing this

text. Jai Arjun Singh’s incisive questions helped me

structure the ﬁrst draft. I referred to posts by Dina

Mehta and Bala Pitchandi to check on my recollection of

the sequence of events. Dina and Bala, Megha Murthy,

Neha Vishwanathan, Nilanjana S. Roy and Devangshu

Datta critiqued this account for me at various times and

gave me their opinions, invaluable in ﬁne-tuning it from

the ﬁrst disjointed scribbles. Shuddhabrata Sengupta

gave me the opportunity to ﬁrst publish it in the Sarai

Reader. Frederick Noronha and Nalaka Gunawardene

charmed me into rewriting it for this book.

And every member of all the collaborations I’ve been

part of helped me understand the process a little better,

while we helped each other reﬁne, modify and make

more useful, often on the ﬂy, a very raw concept.

On 26 December 2004, Sri Lanka faced its worst-

ever natural disaster recorded in recent history. A

similar event is believed to have taken place, more

than 2,000 years ago, but that could be more a

legend. On the other hand, the Boxing Day tsunami

was nothing short of harsh reality hitting one’s head

like an express train. Nearly 40,000 people died in

a span of a few hours. More than a million, out of

a total Sri Lankan population of about 20 million,

were displaced. The aggregate cost to property was

estimated to be in the order of one to two billion

dollars.

These are all the well known parts of the story.

Perhaps a lesser-known fact was that the majority of

these 40,000 lives could have been saved. To see how

this was possible, one needs only to have a careful look

at the time-line of the critical events that occurred on

that fateful day.

Let us start from the very beginning.

At 7.00 am local time on Boxing Day, a large

earthquake occurs in the Indian Ocean, near Sumatra,

Indonesia.

Later, newspapers report that tremors took place

within a few minutes in some parts in the island, but

the impact was too minor to be taken seriously by

a casual observer. Nevertheless, these are recorded

at the Pallekele Seismological Station

, in Sri Lanka

itself, where sophisticated equipment monitors such

events round-the-clock. What is missing though is an

ofﬁcer to have a look at the graphs and tell the rest

of the world about the potential danger of the event

about to happen in South Asia too in a few hours time.

Alas, it is a Sunday following the night of

Christmas.

It is too much to expect a typical

government servant to be on duty at that moment.

So, the ﬁrst opportunity to issue an early warning is

forever gone.

Pallekele Seismological Station, of course, is

not the only point where this vital information gets

recorded. At 7:07 am, the resulting seismic signals

make the Hawaii-based Paciﬁc Tsunami Warning

Center (PTWC) trigger an internal alarm that alerts

watchstanders located in different regions. At 7:10 am,

the PTWC issues another message to observatories

in the Paciﬁc, with its preliminary earthquake

parameters.

At 7:14 am local time, the PTWC issues a bulletin

providing information on the earthquake, stating that

there is no tsunami threat to the Paciﬁc nations that

participate in the Tsunami Warning System in the

Paciﬁc (ITSU). India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives

are not part of this Paciﬁc-focussed system. At 8:04

am, the PTWC issues bulletin No. 2, revising the

earthquake magnitude to 8.5. That bulletin states that

there is no tsunami threat to the Paciﬁc, but identiﬁes

the possibility of a tsunami near the epicenter.

This means there is a time-gap of 23 minutes

before the ﬁrst waves would eventually strike the east

coast of Sri Lanka. If there was to be an island-wide

radio broadcast of the warning, time could have well

been sufﬁcient for local communities to vacate the

risky areas.

However, in the coastal areas of Sri Lanka there is

no warning so no one evacuates one’s house.

What happens afterwards is the greatest tragedy.

At 8.27 am, the ﬁrst tsunami waves hit the

island. The ﬁrst major town to be hit is Batticaloa, the

provincial capital of the Eastern Province, at 8.40 am.

Trincomalee, the port-city on the north-east coast, and

Hambantota, the town on the south-east coast, are

hit within a few minutes of each other, at 8.52 am and

8.55 am, respectively. Areas in the Jaffna peninsula

are under water by 9.00 am. At 9.15 Galle, the third

largest city in the country on the south-western tip of

Sri Lanka, is hit. Areas close to Colombo, on the west

coast, are hit between 9.20 and 9.30 am.

The undeniable fact is that there had been a nearly

30-minute difference between the time the towns in

the east costs and the ones in the west costs were ﬁrst

hit. Statistics tell us that 37 out of every 100 persons

in Sri Lanka own telephones, almost 80% of the

households have radios, and 71% have televisions.

Still there were hardly any messages emanating

from the east coast to the west, about the impending

disaster. When the ﬁshing communities in the villages

of the west coast see the 10-meter-high waves coming

at them, they have no idea that somebody could have

pre-warned them.

There are other unimaginable tragedies waiting

to happen.

The railway authorities realise that one of their

trains is moving down south, towards a risk prone

area. They attempt to call the railway stations en

route. The train is parked at the Ambalangoda railway

station, when the station master’s phone rings

constantly. Nobody answers it. Both the station master

and his deputy are busy supervising the unloading of

some goods from the train. By the time they receive

the message, the train had already left the station.

They do not have any way of issuing a warning, as the

engine drive does not have a mobile phone.

The train stops sometime later, in the middle

of a village that had already been hit by the ﬁrst

waves. Those who are running for their lives assume

the train to be a shield against the waves. They are

wrong. The next waves hit the train, carrying it away

like a child’s toy. The railway tracks get crumpled like

a Möbius strip. If it can be called a railway accident,

this would have been the worst train accident the

world had ever witnessed.

It alone costs more then

2,500 lives. Perhaps many of those lives could have

saved if only the engine driver has been given a

mobile phone.

Is that the end of the story? Sadly, no.

One key sign of an approaching tsunami, it is

better acknowledged now, is the receding of water

along the shoreline, exposing areas that are normally

always submerged. It has been reported that on 24

December 2004, in some of the coastal areas the

water submerged for 1-2 km.

This had opened the

doors of a seemingly-miraculous new world for

spectators, in the area. None of them knew of the

danger that was about to come. So, when the waves

came later, they were not even on the shore where

they might have held a tree if they were lucky. They

were out there in the sea bed.

Many among the 40,000 who lost their lives

were spectators of this sort. Most of their bodies were

never recovered.

Now let me summarize what emerges from the

facts above.

1. The monitoring equipment did record the

tremors; but by the time someone noticed it, the

damage had already been done.

2. Warning messages were issued in time, and most

probably might have been available on the Net for

even more time. Unfortunately, that never reached

the ones who needed it most: the communities at

risk.

3. Even when we knew we are hit, we didn’t think it

necessary to communicate that information to the

rest.

4. We wanted to pass messages to the critical

individuals (like the engine drive of that ill-fated

train) who however did not have the necessary

equipment to receive such messages

5. We had no idea about the do’s and don’ts in

the face of a disaster, because nobody had ever

educated us on this. So we walked towards the

emptied seabed without ever thinking about the

impending disaster that was to come our way.

Do you see where the gaps are?

One, and an important one, was the issue of

communication. It had nothing to do with the

monitoring of the disaster itself. We had enough

indications. What we failed to do was to communicate

the right message to the right people, within the

required time-frame.

Two, the lack of awareness. Even if the message

had been passed to the community at the right time,

probably they would not have evacuated in time,

as they possibly could not have then foreseen the

magnitude of the damage to come. This is true for any

disaster that happens for the ﬁrst time.

Unfortunately, this sad scenario is not just limited

to Sri Lanka. This is exactly what also happened in

India, Indonesia and Thailand. In all these countries,

costal communities faced the tsunami as a complete

surprise.

So what remedies one can suggest

so that when the next disaster happens

-- which may or may not be a tsunami

-- we do not see the same series of

events repeated? What exactly is the

role that the media can play?

Firstly, establishing disaster

warning channels is absolutely

essential and should take priority

among the tasks of any national

government: One cartoon widely distributed over the Net

in the tsunami aftermath portrayed two scenarios. On the

left panel, there were so many satellites, television stations

and dish antennas. That was the technology used to beam

the horriﬁc images of the tragedy to the living rooms of the

West. On the right was completely blank. That was the

technology used to detect the tsunami and communicate

the much-needed warnings. Given the commercial nature

of the media and communication industries, it might be

too much for any developing country to expect a balance

between the left and right panels.

However, it might still not be too much for every

citizen to expect his or her government to have proper

disaster monitoring communication systems set in place.

After all, it is a question of life and death, a basic right

of any citizen of any country. What can take the priority

over that?

The below table shows some of the media channels that can be used for disaster communication, with their

relative strengths and weaknesses.

Secondly, detection

is critical, but without

communication, it serves no purpose: No need

to elaborate on this, since it is now obvious that what

matters is the strength of the weakest link. Failure of

communication channel somewhere in the middle -- or

perhaps even just an half-hour delay -- is equivalent to

having no warning systems at all. A warning delayed is a

warning denied.

Thirdly, when it comes to disaster warning,

it should not be a choice of one medium or

technology over another: The very reason why

there are different modes of communication is because

none of them are hundred percent perfect. Each has its

strengths and weaknesses. The appropriateness of every

channel depends on the environment where they are to

be applied. So, the least one expect is a competition of

modes and technologies. Depending upon the situation,

one should decide what combinations are the best.

Fourthly, disaster warning is everyone’s

business: Life for most of us would have been

easier had the government taken full charge of

disaster warnings. Unfortunately, the things do not

work that way. These are some of key stakeholders

and they have speciﬁc roles that they can play:

• The scientiﬁc community: Develop the early

warning systems based on their expertise, support

the design of scientiﬁc and systematic monitoring

and warning services and translate technical

information to layman’s language.

• National governments: Adopt policies and

frameworks that facilitate early warning, operate

Early Warning Systems, issue warnings for their

country in a timely and effective manner.

• Local governments: Analyse and store

critical knowledge of the hazards to which

the communities are exposed. Provide this

information to the national governments

• International bodies: Provide ﬁnancial and

technical support for national early warning

activities and foster the exchange of data and

knowledge between individual countries.

• Regional institutions and organisations:

Provide specialized knowledge and advice in

support of national efforts, to develop or sustain

operational capabilities experienced by countries

that share a common geographical environment.

• Non-governmental organisations: Play

a critical role in raising awareness among

individuals and organizations involved in early

warning and in the implementation of early

warning systems, particularly at the community

level.

• The private sector: Play an essential role in

implementing the solutions, using their know-how

or donations (in-kind or cash) of goods or services,

especially for the communication, dissemination and

response elements of early warning.

• The media: It has to play an important role in

improving the disaster consciousness of the general

population, and disseminating early warnings. This

can be the critical link between the agency that offer

the warning and the recipients.

• Communities: These are central to people-oriented

early warning systems. Their input to system-design

and their ability to respond ultimately determines

the extent of risk associated with natural hazards.

Finally, technology matters but people

matter more: There is a school of thought that

suggests that technology is a panacea every problem

humankind faces, be that poverty, a lack of proper

healthcare, human rights violations or disasters. Let us

not fall into this trap.

Technology is important. The sole reason behind

the seemingly incredible advancements that have

happened in the ﬁeld of human development is the

spurt in the growth of new technology. However

without people to handle it properly, the technology

per se can achieve little. What we can expect a

sophisticate earthquake detecting device to do, if there

are no human beings to take note what it indicates?

So, while giving technology its due position, let us

focus on the people-side of the problems.

For many weeks, Jantakarn Thep-Chuay -

- nicknamed Beam -– did not understand why her

father was not coming home. The eight-year-old girl,

in Takuapa in Thailand’s southern district of Phang

Nga, had last seen him go to work on the morning of 26

December 2004.

“On that Sunday, the day there was a wave, my dad

wore his tennis shoes,” she recalls as she gets into his

pair of sandals. “My dad didn’t have to do much work

-- he just walked around looking after workers.”

Beam’s father Sukaroak –- a construction

supervisor at a new beach resort in Khao Lak –- was

one of thousands of Thais and foreign tourists killed

when the Asian Tsunami hit without warning. His body

was never found.

For months, Beam would draw pictures of her

family. These, and family photos of happier times,

helped her to slowly come to terms with what

happened.

The ﬁrst year was long and hard for the family

Sukaroak left behind: Beam, her two-year-old brother

Boom, and mother Sumontha, 28. The determined

young widow struggled to keep home ﬁres burning -

– and to keep her troublesome in-laws at bay.

As if that were not enough, she also had to engage

assorted bureaucracies: even obtaining an ofﬁcial death

certiﬁcate for her late husband entailed much effort.

Just a few weeks after the disaster, the local

authorities approached Sumontha suggesting that

she gives away one or both her children for adoption.

Apparently a foreigner was interested. She said a ﬁrm ‘No’.

“Her dad wanted Beam to become an architect. He

was hoping for a day when he could build something she

draws,” says Sumontha. “If I am still alive, I want to raise

my own children. I am their mother. For better or worse,

I want to raise them myself.”

The Tsunami destroyed Beam’s school, but she

continued to attend a temporary school set up with local

and foreign help. Before the year ended, she moved to a

brand new ‘Tsunami School’ that the King of Thailand

built to guarantee education for all children affected by

the disaster.

Sumontha, Beam and Boom are three ordinary Asians

who have shown extraordinary courage, resilience and

resourcefulness as they coped with multiple challenges of

rebuilding their lives after the Tsunami. Theirs is one of

eight families that we followed throughout 2005, under

our empathetic communication initiative called Children

of Tsunami: Rebuilding the Future.

It was a multi-country, multi-media project

that tracked how ordinary Asians rebuilt their lives,

livelihoods and futures after one of the biggest

disasters in recent years. We documented on TV, video

and web the personal recovery stories of eight affected

families in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand

for a year after the disaster. Our many media products

-- distributed on broadcast, narrowcast and online

platforms -– inspired wide ranging public discussion

on disaster relief, recovery and rehabilitation. In that

process, we were also able to demonstrate that a more

engaged, respectful kind of journalism was possible

when covering post-disaster situations.

Children of Tsunami was conceived hurriedly in

the ﬁrst week of January 2005. It was born out of our

collective outrage and frustration.

The aftermath of the Asian Tsunami was covered

exhaustively by the national and international media.

We at TVE Asia Paciﬁc -- a regionally operating non-

proﬁt organisation that uses television and video

to communicate development -- felt this coverage

focused too much on death and destruction, or on

survivors’ misery and suffering. Yes, there was plenty

of that in all the many locations affected, but there

were also many instances of extraordinary courage,

resilience and generosity under duress. These were

treated as ‘soft’ stories, ﬁlling air time in between main

news bulletins that were mostly about deaths or dollars.

And this saturation coverage lasted only for a few

days. Soon, journalists moved on to other stories, and

the tsunami as a news story started going down in the

news hierarchy.

Yet the story was far from over for those affected.

We looked for a way to keep up with the story. We

decided to document the gradual recovery process -

– and stay on with many evolving stories long after TV

news cameras had left the scene.

We realised that the Asian tsunami could be a ‘test’

for how information and communications technologies

(ICTs) can support humanitarian assistance and human

development. (The broader deﬁnition of ICTs includes

television and radio.)

We were further inspired by the words of Sir Arthur

C Clarke, inventor of the communications satellite, who

said shortly after the disaster: “Media need to move

beyond body counts and aid appeals to ﬁnd lasting,

meaningful ways of supporting Asia’s recovery. The real

stories of survival and heroism are only just beginning.

Let network TV move on to the next big story. I am

conﬁdent that the cyber activists and committed local

journalists will keep us informed.”

It was this challenge that we took up with

Children of Tsunami.

We chose to cover the four countries that were

hardest hit: India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

In each country, we found and commissioned a locally

based yet internationally experienced ﬁlm-maker team

who would capture the recovery stories with empathy

and authenticity. With their help, we then identiﬁed

eight typical families –- two in each country -– who

were affected in one way or another. After obtaining

the families’ informed consent, our ﬁlming started in

February 2005.

We invited a child in each affected family to

guide us through the year, as our ﬁlm crews returned

to them month after month (see Box). We felt that

working with children –- even though logistically

harder -– would enable us to tell this complex story

in a way that appeals not only to minds but also

hearts. In this sense, our story telling approach was

very different from the facts-laden documentaries

and other media products about the Tsunami and its

aftermath.

Although we stayed focused on the eight children,

we also covered their families and communities. The ﬁrst

year saw some major relief and rebuilding efforts carried

out by governments, aid workers and NGOs. Trying to

personalise the multitude of statistics, aid pledges and

recovery plans, we asked how all this was impacting the

eight children, their own families and neighbours.

In doing so, we adopted a principle that Mahatma

Gandhi had suggested decades ago: ﬁnd out how a

development effort reaches and touches the last man,

woman and child.

Our biggest challenge was not marshalling

information, but how we related to the eight survivor

families.

As journalists, we have been trained not to get

‘too attached’ to the people or subjects we cover

professionally, lest it affects our judgement and dilutes

our ‘objectivity’. When we brought together the four

production teams involved in Children of Tsunami for

our ﬁrst (and only) production planning meeting, we all

resolved to follow this norm in our year-long coverage of

the families.

We also agreed not to reward our participating

families in cash or kind, as they were all participating

voluntarily with informed consent. And our teams were

briefed not to intervene in the aid or recovery efforts by

anyone.

But we soon found out that the ground reality was

different. As Asia’s longest year (2005) wore on, our

production teams found themselves becoming attached

to the families they were ﬁlming. Sometimes -- acting

purely as human beings, not journalists -- they simply

had to play good Samaritans:

• On some occasions, our teams found a survivor

family close to starvation and bought dry rations

or arranged for a cooked meal before any ﬁlming

commenced.

• At other times, when the children appeared restless

or aimless, our ﬁlm teams gifted them a football, kite

or another inexpensive toy that later produced hours

of joy and cheer.

• In March 2005, our India ﬁlm crew found Mala's

father seriously ill with a lung infection (triggered

by his near-drowning during the Tsunami) and his

family unable to seek medical attention. When the

crew rushed the sick man to a nearby government-

run hospital, doctors refused to admit or treat him --

due to his supposedly low caste! It was only when the

crew threatened to ﬁlm the entire episode, and have

it broadcast that same day, that medical attention

was ﬁnally provided. Discarding all production plans,

our crew stayed with Mala’s family at the hospital

through the night and next day to ensure the doctors

gave her father the correct medical attention. The

family believes that the production team saved her

father’s life that day.

As commissioners and publishers of Children

of Tsunami stories, we had no problems with any

of these acts of human kindness. We far preferred

journalism with empathy to the cold detachment

that journalism schools and textbooks recommended

for such situations. (Incidentally, our media-

based documentation project did not seek to raise

any donations for speciﬁc individuals or families.

Occasional enquiries for help we received as a result of

the media exposure for participating families were duly

passed on to local charities best equipped to handle

them.)

Instead, we stayed focused on telling the recovery

stories and amplifying the voices of survivors. Our

year-long ﬁlming produced a range of outputs in a

variety of formats intended for different platforms and

audiences.

We told the story as we went along. Every month,

our four ﬁlm teams produced a 5-minute video report

on each child and family. We uploaded these to a free,

public access website we built and placed at

www.childrenoftsunami.info. This website also carried

additional text, still photos and links that enabled

visitors to follow the personal stories as they evolved

through 2005.

At the end of 2005, distilling the best material from

one year’s worth of ﬁlm footage, we produced two long

format documentaries, viz:

• Children of Tsunami: The Journey Continues (48

mins) captured the highlights and ‘lowlights’ of

our families’ ﬁrst year following the disaster. This

was broadcast by TV channels across Asia on the

Tsunami’s ﬁrst anniversary in December 2005,

and has since been screened at ﬁlm festivals and

international conferences around the world.

• Children of Tsunami: No More Tears (25 mins)

was a shorter version we co-produced with the

Singapore-based regional broadcaster Channel News

Asia. This too had repeat broadcasts during the ﬁrst

anniversary and afterwards.

Signiﬁcantly, all material produced under

Children of Tsunami was distributed completely

free of license fees or royalty to broadcasters,

educational institutions and civil society groups. This

was consistent with the project’s non-commercial

character, with our national ﬁlm crews donating their

services (billing only for logistics), and TV stations

across Asia assigning prime time broadcast slots

entirely for free. Many stations also versioned our

English language documentaries into local languages

at their cost. The website continues to archive all these

outputs for free public access.

Besides public dissemination through different

media platforms at regional and global level, Children

of Tsunami ﬁlms were also taken back to the

participating families each month while the ﬁlming

was going on. This was part of the engagement we

wanted our ﬁlm teams to maintain. The families saw

how their real life story was being told to the world,

and also how the other famailies were faring.

Children of Tsunami did not set out on a fact-

ﬁnding mission nor did it engage in hard core

investigative journalism. We just wanted to document

the recovery process of eight affected families over the

ﬁrst year, helping amplify their voices and stories.

In that process, we derived some very interesting

insights and came across powerful personal

testimonies. Taken together, our eight case studies

offered an indication of the uneven progress made on

the road to tsunami recovery -– one paved with missed

opportunities, broken promises, false starts, donor

arrogance, government indifference and political

bickering. More encouragingly, we also found, at

individual levels, inspiring real life stories of survival,

resilience, courage and triumph.

Here are a few highlights – and lowlights – in the

ﬁrst year of Children of Tsunami:

• What happened to the money? Individuals,

groups and governments that donated generously

expected that support to help the short-term

survival needs as well as long-term recovery needs.

While part of this money eventually found its

way to those in need, a good deal was dissipated,

wasted or pilfered along the way. Rigid government

bureaucracies, charity inefﬁciencies, local corruption

and favouritism – among other factors -- made a

mockery of donor’s good intentions. Within the

same country, we found discriminatory practices

that favoured one affected community over another

(see box on page 35).

• Governments of the people? Across the four

countries, there was wide-spread disillusionment

with local and central governments: affected people

felt their elected representatives had let them down.

Community and religious leaders became more

vocal as the year progressed. Some governments

acknowledged by the year’s end that much of the

aid was still entangled in red tape. Problems were

aggravated by draconian post-tsunami regulations

– such as Sri Lanka’s controversial ‘exclusion zone’

that banned all new buildings within 100 metres of

the shore (which was withdrawn a year later).

• Logo-delivery mechanisms? While the public

perception of NGOs, aid agencies and charities was

better, people were critical of inter-agency rivalries

and the humanitarian sector’s own rigidity and

inefﬁciency. Adding insult to injury was a ‘Tsunami

hit parade’ witnessed across affected Asia for weeks

after the disaster: heads and senior ofﬁcials of UN

agencies, international charities and bilateral donors

toured the region – mainly to be photographed by

the media. These publicity stunts, and the intense

competition to stick agency logos on every single

item donated, didn’t endear these angels of mercy to

affected communities.

• Gone with the waves: One of the biggest hurdles

survivor families faced was the loss of tools, vessels

and structures with which they earned a living.

Many were self-employed, or ran small businesses.

Practically none came within social safety nets or

insurance schemes. Unaccustomed to living on

donations or government rations, and yet unable

to raise the capital to restart their livelihoods, most

surviving adults were frustrated and bitter. As the year

ended, half of our eight families had not bounced back

to pre-Tsunami economic activity levels; two were

almost destitute.

• Goodbye, school: Tens of thousands of Asian

children found their education disrupted -- including

some of our featured children. When waves destroyed

Theeban’s school in eastern Sri Lanka, he dropped

out and soon became an apprentice at a tractor

repairing garage. Mala’s school was intact, but her

family couldn’t afford to send her to school anymore.

Putri, Yenni and Beam had their schools damaged or

destroyed but their families managed to keep them in

temporary schools. Heshani and Selvam too continued

their schooling from temporary shelters. (At 16, Bao

had already dropped out of school before the disaster.)

• New roles for survivors: When families

were decimated, survivors found new roles and

responsibilities thrust upon them. Elder siblings were

suddenly bread-winners. Grandparents had to step in

to take care of grandchildren. And religious leaders

had to play counsellor to thousands of grieving or

traumatised people.

• Healing wounded minds: Even though the

mismanaged aid effort took care of some physical

needs of affected families, there was little external

support for their psychological needs. For these, some

turned to religion. Asia’s many cultural and religious

festivals – when they arrived in their annual cycles

– were low key affairs this year, but provided much

needed healing for surviving families. Still, few could

answer one question asked by many survivors: why

us?

• Salvation for sale? While religions helped many

people in their hour of need, other things were

happening in the name of religion. The Tsunami’s

aftermath attracted thousands of different groups to

affected areas. Among them were groups who came

offering Christianity as a “relief item”. Families in

distress were promised relief or recovery assistance

– if they converted. Two of our eight families came

across this phenomenon quite independently – in

places as far apart as India and Thailand. One family

(in India) accepted; the other (in Thailand) declined.

These and other ﬁndings were presented in the two

documentaries, supported by visuals and interviews.

Although our sample was very small, it

nevertheless unearthed or highlighted many

disparities in post-Tsunami recovery. By the time our

ﬁlming with the eight families ended in December

2005, only three of our eight families had recovered

to some degree of normalcy. The others were still

struggling to stay alive and stay together. The families

of Theeban (Sri Lanka), Mala (India) and Yenni

(Indonesia) were the worst off. Among them, Theeban

was to wander aimlessly for nearly two and half years

after the disaster before coming upon a fate worse

than the Tsunami (see box on page 36).

Children of Tsunami was the most demanding

media project that we personally and TVE Asia Paciﬁc

institutionally have embarked upon. This project

underlined the pivotal role of communication in post-

I will remember 3 March 2007 with sadness.

That day, four gunmen murdered the teenager

we had tracked in eastern Sri Lanka for the

documentary, Children of Tsunami – No More

Tears. Thillainayagam Theeban was gunned down

in front of his grandmother in a tin shed in a

temporary shelter in Karaitivu. He had been living

there after the Tsunami wrecked his home and killed

his mother and baby brother.

A child’s murder outrages us. As a sense-maker,

I ask the old question. Why do bad things happen

to innocent people who have already suffered so

much? As a journalist, I learn to move on. I get a

unique vantage point on some of the world’s most

shattering events as a television news editor with

a regional network. The images are indelible. But

when a catastrophe hits, no task is more important

than to impart the news fast, accurately and fairly.

In the crush of facts, it is easy to overlook

stories on the margins of the breathless headlines.

Stories on disaster boil down essentially to details

about individuals and communities. The real stories

happen to real people on the side stream. Children

of Tsunami enabled quiet, powerful story-telling

that is not explosive enough for the mainstream

media. It turned the lens on small people to call

attention to big issues that demand humane

solutions. It returned story-telling to the ﬁrst force

of knowing the world – the image.

Despite efforts to change the depiction of

natural disasters, many media reports still portray

a patronising view. Death and destruction conjure

to injure helpless victims before heroic saviours

arrive at catastrophe territory. Cheap shots and

clichés assault you in deadline-driven copy. Body

counts and quickness of death distinguish the

standard disaster-news-template. For human

interest, look for the “higher hand” thing, like the

last church, temple or mosque left standing. For

an uplifting angle, ﬁnd a miracle survivor, like an

infant “snatched from the jaws of death.” Throw

in a villager or politician to blame government

unprepared-ness.

In making documentaries, I remain astute

to the human experience. Reality is to be found

by focusing on internal human processes and

movements. The narrative approach strikes

an emotional chord elusive to other forms of

journalism. It breathes life into the ﬁve ‘W’s of the

inverted pyramid of traditional journalism, which

arranges who, what, where, when and why from the

most important to the least important.

The Children of Tsunami project required the

ﬁlm-makers to immerse in local detail to create

a meaningful larger picture. Out of the accounts

drawn from four countries with diverse cultures,

faiths and geography emerged themes of grace in

grief, courage in catastrophe and faith in the future.

The children’s testimonies showed remarkable

recall for detail. The eye of the camera, unﬂinching

yet intimate, invited them to gather strength from

being heard and understood (see box).

Ours perhaps is the most hopeful and the

most fearful of eras. Blogs, podcasts, videophones

and digital cameras have expanded the space and

means available for covering the public interest.

Weeks after the Asian Tsunami disaster, the

Internet supplanted television as a video platform

in disseminating information. Amateur videos

shot at ground zero helped the world to experience

a disaster in ways not possible just a decade ago.

If the Tsunami taught us a lesson in humility, it

also tested our humanity. This equal-opportunity

catastrophe did not discriminate. It swept away

everyone and everything in its path. It orphaned a

generation in Asia.

Indonesian television journalist Dendy

Montgomery saw 10-metre tall, black colour waves of

the Asian Tsunami kill thousands of people and cause

massive property damage in his homeland of Aceh.

Two and a half years after the disaster, he feels

waves of forgetfulness are compounding the tragedy.

The western coastal areas of Aceh, on the northern

tip of Sumatra island, were among the hardest hit

by the tsunami on 26 December 2004. According to

estimates, around 160,000 people were killed in Aceh

and 500,000 were left homeless.

On that fateful day, Montgomery and his

photographer wife Nur Raihan Lubis saw the waters

engulf areas near the majestic Grand Mosque

landmark, saved others by carrying them away in their

old jeep, and narrowly missed death.

“We lost at least 50 relatives (from our joint

family),” Montgomery said in an interview conducted

in Bangkok.

“(After that) I lost my sense of reporting for one

month,” Montgomery explains. “Reuters (with whom

he has been a TV stringer) wanted to give me a Betacam

(camera). But I’m just thinking, can I just take a break

for awhile. Everybody and everything appeared the

same to me. There were broken pieces... and dead

bodies. And I was a tsunami victim myself,” he said.

For six months after the disaster, the epicentre of

the massive Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 remained

in the news.

“But after that, I don’t know. We didn’t have

(dramatic pictures) like broken homes. So (editors)

probably felt it was not a ‘sexy’ story anymore,” says

a bewildered Montgomery, named after the famous

American general, who had impressed his grandfather,

himself a military man.

When the tsunami’s ﬁrst anniversary came up,

reporting took a spurt. Then it slowed down again. It

was a similar story with the second anniversary.

“You should follow your heart. Journalists from

elsewhere come to (this northern tip of the Sumatra

island) to do with their news director wants, not to

report what’s happening in the ﬁeld,” he says.

Montgomery says he slowly got back to the

camera, when he got a chance to do long-term work

on the lives of tsunami survivors. That was when

he became involved in the Indonesian component

of Children of Tsunami – a regional media project

that tracked the recovery stories of tsunami affected

families in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Montgomery served as cameraman and his wife

contributed as researcher for the Indonesia stories,

which tracked the recovery struggles of two Tsunami

affected girls -- Putri, 8, and Yenni, 15.

“It was like being born again. After months, I

began thinking about getting a good picture,” he

recalls.

He says the conﬂict in Aceh, earlier known for

its separatist rebel movement ﬁghting for greater

autonomy from Indonesia, is also not viewed as “sexy

anymore” in newsrooms.

“Sometimes journalists ask the military to shoot

from their tank, and then report (on TV) as if they are

in the heat of a battle,” says he.

“Some ask me, ‘Hey Dendi, where can we ﬁnd

good gun-ﬁghting?’ So I tell them, why do you want

to ﬁnd something like this? Don’t break my heart. I’m

Achenese. Why would like gunﬁghting? Just for your

audience? Or your TV station?” he adds.

Aceh has substantial natural resources, including

oil and gas -- some estimates put Aceh gas reserves as

being the largest in the world. “We’ve got wealth, but

no development,” Montgomery puts it.

The Kingdom of Aceh was established initially as a

small Islamic kingdom in the 12th century AD. During

its golden era, its territory and political inﬂuence

expanded as far as Satun in southern Thailand, Johor

in Malay Peninsula, and Siak in what is today Riau

province.

Its capital, Banda Aceh, gets the ﬁrst part of its

name from the Persian, meaning ‘port’ or ‘haven’.

“It’s not even a true war (in Aceh). But we can ﬁnd

a victim everyday,” says Montgomery. “It’s easy to kill

people. Once they are dead, you

can claim they are from the Free

Aceh Movement or from the

military, depends which side

you’re on.”

This separatist battle began

in 1998, but ﬂared up in 2001.

But on a more personal

note, Montgomery’s personal

loss is that of his gear, gone

with the tsunami waves. “If

I need to do a production,

I need to rent a camera,

tripod, mike-boom... and pay

approximately $150 per day

for that,” he says.

It was many years ago that I met that woman

in Shondeep. It was after the cyclone in Bangladesh

in 1991. Our helicopter had landed in the damaged

airstrip of Patenga airport in Chittagong. There had

been no ﬁre, so why were the leaves all charred? What

had happened on that fateful night of 29 April?

My questions to the ‘experts’ resulted in the

standard response. The NGO workers told me of the

bags of wheat they’d given out. The engineers talked of

the torque of the wind. The government ofﬁcers spoke

of the funds they had allocated.

Then the woman spoke. In a quiet but controlled

voice she recounted, ‘The land became the sea and the

sea became a wave’.

It took those words, for me the photographer, to

see what had happened that night.

The Tsunami had come and gone. While I had felt

the pain of the Tsunami victims and their survivors,

the predominant media coverage of western tourists

and western ‘experts’ had angered me. As an aid

worker and later a photographer after the Tsunami

in Sri Lanka, I could relate to the resilience of the

victims, but the aid efforts had changed.

There were many more ‘experts’ in the fray

and I could see how the media and other major

players determined how things panned out. I had

arrived after the event. In Trincomalee, the placid

water of the ancient tanks gave no sense of the

horror on Boxing Day. I then went to Telwatta,

on the southern coast, where the train Samudra

Devi (‘Goddess of the Sea’) had been devoured by

the wave. Where the land had become the sea.

Shanika, the little girl I’d tried to photograph

in the remains of her home, was terriﬁed of the

sea. She had lost her twin sister, her two other

sisters and her mother to the waters. Priantha,

her father, had taken his family to the train for

safety, and had watched in horror as the sea

moved in.

Shanika knew the sea was not to be trusted.

She had been with her aunt, and had only heard

what had happened. Had she seen the waves?

Had she felt the fury? I never found out, but we

made friends. The digital camera made it easy

to share pictures and we photographed each

other and approached the sea together. And she

was telling me to be careful. We spoke different

languages, but I wanted to know what she felt

about the sea. That night after dusk, I went back

to the edge of the water, and in that muted light, I

tried to see the things Shanika had feared. Where

the sea had become a giant wave.

children we had gone out singing songs, and collecting

blankets, whenever a disaster struck. I wanted to

go out to Pakistan, but it was different this time.

One needed visas, letters of invitation and ofﬁcial

permission. The right time to be there, and capture the

unfolding story, came and went. I decided to wait.

But as the media predictably moved on, and the

people outside affected areas gradually forgot the

disaster, the pain gnawed inside of me. As the winter

drew near, I worried about what might be happening.

My friends in CONCERN, an NGO I had worked for

before, were already out there and I decided to join

them. Arriving in Islamabad in the early hours of

one morning in December 2006, I soon headed off to

Muzaffarabad.

This time the waves were different. Entire

mountainsides had ﬂowed like liquid, crushing all

in their path. Trucks were still clearing winding

pathways, blocked by massive landslides.

I was nervous as I went through the long tunnel

that was the gateway to Azad Kashmir. Tents dotted

either side of the roads, but even amidst the rubble

and despair, life was going on. Children were playing

with whatever they could ﬁnd. A teacher was teaching

Yet, exactly a year earlier on 26 December 2003,

and almost to the hour, nature had also reminded us

of her presence. The historic city of Bam, in Iran, had

been all but reduced to rubble. The clay bricks, the

domed rooftops, and the fact that people were at home

sleeping, all led to the huge loss of life. With no light

and no electricity, the few that were living could do

little to retrieve the dying.

Iran is no stranger to earthquakes. Another

curious cycle of roughly ten years separates the

devastating quakes that have rocked this land. I wasn’t

there, but my photographer friends had decided that

we would not be allowed to forget this calamity. Over

a period of months, they documented the misery, the

valour, the strength and the ﬁghting spirit of those

who survived and remained but refused to give in.

The witnesses of our time have ensured that we on

the sidelines also bear witness. We later exhibited our

work together. Trying to pass on nature’s message.

8 October 2005. Breaking out from the cyclic

order of the previous disasters, the quake in Kashmir

took on a different form. News ﬁltered through slowly.

As the death ﬁgures rose, I remembered how as

her class with a blackboard under the open sky.

Moving their tables on to the road, a restaurant was

serving customers.

A solitary telephone, on a rickety table, open to

the wind and other elements, was the most popular

amenity. People desperately sought news of their loved

ones.

It was Amjad, the driver, who brought it home as

we approached Ballakot. He simply said, “This was a

city. Now it’s a graveyard.”

The winter was already setting in when we met a

family in a remote mountain near Neelam. Fatema’s

husband had been crushed by their falling roof. Her

mother in law had been hurled below, survived the

fall, but died of a heart attack when she heard of her

son’s death. They had not come across the army,

government ofﬁcials or NGOs, but as in Muzaffarabad,

they were just getting on with their lives. Their top

priority was to rebuild their homes before the snow

closed in.

The response by ordinary people was

overwhelming. Winter came and went. Many survived

the bitter chill, but months later, and nearly a year

on, much of the talked-about reconstruction had not

happened. The pledges seemed to have been forgotten.

I decided to return. I had worked hurriedly the

ﬁrst time, and felt there were many personal stories

that needed to be recorded. Nearly a year after the

Kashmir quake, I went back.

On the ﬁrst occasion, I slept in a tent in the

garden of the CONCERN ofﬁce. This time I stayed

indoor. The ofﬁce couch became my bed. But nearly

a year on, tents were still where most people lived.

The after tremors still shook the homes, and even

those who had moved back to their houses lived in

fear. They would move out to tents at night. They

didn’t trust themselves enough to wake up in time

and move out in case there was another quake

during the night.

As we went through the ravaged land, we

found people who had suffered many times over.

Shabbir and Razia had taken shelter in a tent after

their house was destroyed. Their temporary home

was washed away by a ﬂash ﬂood, one of the many

after effects of the earthquake. They lost everything

that they salvaged after the quake, and some Rs.

17,000 (US$ 282 approx.) that remained of the

compensation from government. And they now had

a new-born baby to look after.

We came across tender love stories, as that of

Muhammed Saleem Khan, who despite his own

injuries, pushed his unconscious wife Rubina on

a home-made stretcher for two days to the Abbas

Hospital in Muzaffarabad. Muhammed looked after

the children and doted on Rubina, but she was sad.

The children had become close to the father and she

herself, paralysed from the waist down and unable to

look after them, felt the children were moving away

from her.

Safdar Hussain was buried under stones for

four days and thought he would die. Having lost his

wife and children to the earthquake, he wept for his

mother. Unable to hold the pain, his mind had taken

shelter elsewhere.

But Fazila Bibi had a different story to tell. “Before

the earthquake we were happy, healthy people,” she

said, “the sort of people who gave alms to beggars.

Now we have nothing, and we must do with nothing,

but we are stronger people.”

Fazila and her family, conﬁned to a tent in

Jalalabad Park in Muzaffarabad, waited for things to

get better. Waited with quiet strength.

Cluster bombs, warheads, bombs that dig deep

before exploding, compete with burning oil wells, toxic

spills and nuclear dumping, to shake our fragile earth.

Rampant consumer cultures arrogantly shun treaties

to curb our destructive habits. In a globalised world

where material and human world resources are fodder

for exploitation by giant nations and multinational

companies, nature in its fury reminds us that our lives

are entwined.

In the ruins of Telawata, where the fateful train

disaster had taken place, I came across a family that

had gathered in the wreckage of their home. I wanted

to ask them their stories, ﬁnd out what they had seen,

but stopped when I saw them pick up the family

album. They sat amidst the rubble and laughed as they

turned page after page.

I had seen it before. As people rummaged through

the ruins of their homes, the ﬁrst thing they searched

for was photographs. Years earlier at a disaster closer

to home, I had photographed a group of children

amidst the ﬂoods of 1988. The children insisted

on being photographed. As I pressed the shutter,

I realised that the boy in the middle was blind. He

would never see the photograph he was proudly posing

for. Why was it so important for the blind boy to be

photographed?

Though my entry into photography had been

through a happy accident, my choice of becoming a

photographer had been a very conscious one. Having

felt the power of the image I recognised its ability

to move people. The immediacy of an iconic image,

its ability to engage with the viewer, its intimacy,

the universality of its language, means it is at once a

language of the masses, but also the key that can open

doors.

For both the gatekeepers and the public, the image

has a visceral quality that is both raw and delicate.

It can move people to laughter and to tears and can

touch people at many levels. The iconic image lingers,

long after the moment has gone. We are the witnesses

of our times and the historians of our ages. We are the

collective memories of our communities.

For that blind boy in Bangladesh and for the

many who face human suffering but may otherwise be

forgotten, the photograph prevents them from being

reduced to numbers. It brings back humanity in our

lives.

A disaster, or a conﬂict, can spell an abrupt halt to

everything we know and live with. The sea turns into

a demon, the earth devours villages, neighbours turn

into killers. A photographer freezes these dramatic

moments and showcases them to the world. These

images generate shock, information, compassion,

awareness, policy changes, mass action (as in the US

during the Vietnam war) and even entertainment,

in a perverted sense. It takes a while to get the clock

ticking again. If the cameras stay back, as it only rarely

happens, then they can record the budding of life once

again, moment by precious moment.

In this chapter we explore the challenges of

disaster-linked still photography from a media

professional’s perspective. It argues that disaster

photography needs to break away from the constraints

of time and space. There is work to be done – both

before the clock stops, and after it restarts.

By the very nature of disaster, it is the sheer drama

and scale of the event that attract media photographers.

They look for shots that sum up ‘the drama, spirit and

courage in the face of a disasters’, as Thomas E Franklin

said about his famous still of the ﬂag raising at Ground

Zero on 9/11.

That was a ‘decisive moment’ as the

legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson

would have called.

It is all about being at the right place at the right

time, when history happens. This is the essence of

good ﬁeld reporting using any medium – text, sound

or visuals. A discerning photographer can combine

this classic time and space formula with his or her

heart, head and hand to produce lasting memories.

Closer home, the Indian Ocean tsunami produced

a set of unforgettable images.

Perhaps the most telling one about the sorrow

of this tragedy was a picture taken by the Reuters

photographer Arko Datta, showing a woman lying on

sandy ground, mourning a dead relative. It became

the World Press Photo of the year 2005. One of the

jury members called it “graphic, historical and starkly

emotional.”

In fact, this photograph’s power lies in its

understatement, the respect shown to the subject in

keeping the bloated body beyond the frame, showing

only the hand (see box for interview).

At the same time we also saw a ﬂood of images,

rather less respectful – mountains of bodies,

bulldozers burying them en masse, bawling relatives...

The boundary between reporting and disaster

pornography often became very thin and contested.

How much human suffering can actually be shown

visually in the media depends on where the disaster or

humanitarian tragedy occurs.

An unwritten rule of thumb seems to be that the

poorer a region is, the more graphic the international

media’s disaster coverage would be. Few dead bodies

were shown in the visual media coverage after the 9/11

attacks in the United States. But the emaciated, naked

bodies are staple for reporting on African famines while

piles of dead bodies are routinely and explicitly shown

in the aftermath of earthquakes or ﬂoods in other parts

of the developing world.

The presence of cameras at the wrong spot aimed at

a wrong angle is bad enough, but worse is their absence

when people need it the most: after the last aid van has

departed. The cameras vanished from the scene once

the drama was over for the tsunami. The media interest

waned and the assignment charts got ﬁlled with election

campaigns, corporate results, celebrity lifestyles,

wildlife and assorted beauty pageants.

And we had our fair share of disasters in the Indian

subcontinent. When the tsunami-affected people were

rebuilding their lives, living in hot, humid temporary

shelters in all the affected countries, press cameras

were often not there to tell the story to the world. If

the international media played its role as the witness,

thousands would not have suffered in shelters dubbed

as shoeboxes, saunas and ovens across southern Asia.

Fires and ﬂoods would not have displaced many of these

people again and again. In the suburbs of the South

Indian city of Chennai, racketeers thriving on an organ

trade would not have approached them with disgusting

offers.

Still, people showed their resilience and survived

with dignity. They resold boats that did not ﬁt their

ﬁshing patterns -- sometimes back to the aid agencies

themselves. They also exchanged extra blankets

for saris. They insisted that selective, piecemeal,

discriminatory charity would not work. Cameras were

just not there to capture small acts of courage in the face

of a disaster that seemed to have no end.

Across the region, the newfound peace in conﬂict-

striken northern Sumatra tip of Aceh in Indonesia, and

that reached amidst disasters recovery and the broken

ceaseﬁre in Sri Lanka, were news events for the world.

But the visual representation of these events in the

international mainstream media was predominated

by guns – up or down in accordance with the story

– and politicians and commanders shaking hands and

smiling before the ﬂashbulbs. It was not very easy to

ﬁnd pictures of people rebuilding their lives after the

tsunami in Aceh two years since the disaster. And the

Trincomalee (Sri Lanka) ﬁsherman who had to ﬂee his

rebuilt house amid crossﬁre between the militants and

the military did not ﬁnd a camera to tell his tale.

The renewed conﬂict in Sri Lanka sent over

16,000 new refugees to India. Their clandestine

journey across the choppy Palk Straits in overcrowded

small ﬁshing boats, often at night, is perilous and

dramatic by any count. At least 18 people died in

capsizes and accidents in 2006, many were stranded

in the shoals that make the Adam’s Bridge. But when

did you ever see a striking ‘boat people’ picture?

Committed photojournalism involves getting one’s

feet wet. It requires resource support, sound editorial

decisions and, above all, bold photographers. Even all

these may not work if there is no media interest in the

plight of a set of marginal people. Media memory is

indeed short.

The very life of the media lies in its ephemeral

nature. It is all about here-and-now happenings.

This concern with ephemera is in fact the bane of the

media. We, reporters, tend to switch off our senses

to what goes on then and there. Still, persistence of

memory, some long-distance telephone calls and a

little bit of imagination might help a text reporter

to reconstruct a remote event and connect it to the

present. But for a photographer, life revolves around

here-and-now happenings. For a follow-up, she or

he will have to take a ﬂight and land on the spot and

search diligently for the actors of the drama long

after the curtains are down. Or the editor may have to

commission somebody closer there.

Such time and resources are seldom spent by

media houses on development stories. At the same

time, the local media that can actually cover processes

on ground fail to create enough momentum so that

national, regional and international media get to

notice what is going on at the ground level. Getting

wide coverage of local issues like disaster rebuilding

is like the making of an avalanche. It has to roll on to

gain size and momentum.

Humanitarian workers argue that it is important

to have visual coverage at all phases of disasters.

While disaster images generate compassion and

policy interest, the follow-up coverage is essential to

keep-up the interest and to ensure transparency and

accountability.

“Photographs offer a good a reality check,” says

Dr Unnikrishnan PV, an emergencies and conﬂicts

advisor for ActionAid International. “They can alert

the humanitarian and the government system and

help initiate action.” This globetrotter medic advises

photographers to go beyond the roadsides and

highways, to the remote corners where the real story

lies, and witness the resilience of people.

Walking an extra mile and getting closer to people

always produce good pictures. As the famous conﬂict

photographer James Nachtwey says about his style,

a photographer has to operate in the same intimate

space that the subjects inhabit.

While dealing with

people caught up in disasters and conﬂict, this

closeness matters. It blunts the predatory edge of the

camera. The photographer becomes a visitor, rather

than a nosey intruder. Once the photographer knows

the ﬁrst name of the person she or he is shooting, it

becomes a bit difﬁcult to be offensive with the camera.

The Dutch photographer Peter van der Houwen,

who published a book and held an exhibition titled

‘Resilience’, on people recovering from the tsunami

across Asia, shares Nachtwey’s view. “The challenge

is getting closer to people,” he would often say. He

befriended his subjects with Polaroid prints and small

talk -- and sometimes serious debates -- before setting

up his large-format analogue cameras.

This relaxed style is an anti-thesis to the shoot-

and-scoot dictum of the digital era – a departure

from the remote, or rather removed, telephoto-mode

operation. A photographer can be detached, but not

wholly cut-off, from the people suffering when he or

she is covering a disaster, or its aftermath.

If the concern for one’s fellow-being is an

important factor of photography, then it can get

translated into some pre-emptive coverage of would-be

disasters. Those living perilously close to ﬂood-prone

rivers, lightning-speed highways and storm-exposed

coasts can become subjects of futuristic news. For many

of these subjects, the clock is still ticking and the world

does not know or care about the risks they are exposed to.

Photography, like text-based reporting, can have a

prophetic role built, in the sense that it can predict and

depict trends.

The media agenda cannot be set from the ﬁeld

alone. There are issues of power dynamics, economic

constraints, editorial taste and political imperatives

that inﬂuence media choices. Still, a strong storyline

and a promise of stunning visuals coming from a

photographer’s end would be irresistible for any

newsroom.

One way to promote better visual representation

of disasters and conﬂict, and also of the people caught

up in them, would be to empower photographers.

They should be able to make their own storylines,

charting out their own assignments. Some of the

training sessions of the World Press Photo are aimed

at developing better storylines. Such a trend has yet to

catch up in the Asian media.

Besides, the mainstream media in South Asia has

yet to experiment with the photo possibilities offered by

the digital technology and new age design and the use of

multimedia. It requires quite a number of operational

changes in the tradition-bound newsrooms and dark-

rooms. Most of the editors in the region are text-driven,

and all over the world too they have a background in

text reporting or editing. So changes also need to reach

the top.

The way photographs are used can be innovative and

quite effective. There is a trend of publishing a series of

photographs in a series structured as if in a movie and

telling the tale -- sometimes followed up by sound, video

and multimedia clips in a web version. Such innovations

can have a tremendous inﬂuence on humanitarian news

coverage that often gets very little attention.

Meanwhile, it may be worthwhile for Asian

photographers to ﬁnd opportunities to see the work

of one another and to learn about their neighbouring

countries.

Disasters that have recently hit the continent -- like

the tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake and some ﬂoods

in the sub-Himalayan region -- did not respect national

boundaries. There is no likelihood that future events,

especially the climate-change related disasters, would

be restricted to speciﬁc countries. There have been

While doing a report on media perceptions

of disasters in 1999, I interviewed senior editors,

journalists and columnists and asked how they look at

disasters. I wanted to know what role they thought the

media could play in reducing disaster-related risk via the

domain of reporting. One senior editor of an English-

language daily newspaper responded: “What does the

media have to do with disasters, except to report on

it after it has occurred? For us [the media] disaster is

always a front-page story, anyway.”

These reﬂections now hit my memory and remind

me a folkloric narrative on ﬂoods, and how these were

understood in the past in my country, Pakistan, and

probably elsewhere too. This stands in sharp contrast to

the understanding of the editor we encountered.

“Kang aye aiy way loko kang aiye aiy” (this could

be literally translated as “the ﬂood has come o folks, the

ﬂood has come”) is a folkloric narrative in the Punjabi

language, which I have been hearing from my childhood.

It comes from my village, situated in close proximity to

the crucial river Chenab.

In the past, ﬂoods were not just bad news. As the

above comment suggests, this narrative goes beyond a

mere mourning of ﬂood-induced loss in a risk-prone local

geography.

At certain points, it appears to be a cultural satire

and social commentary on locally embedded causes,

the differential impacts and discrimination witnessed

in a disaster like a ﬂood. It’s a traditional but critical

articulation of seeing disasters differently -- by not treating

it narrowly as an ecological event or a stereotypical ‘fury of

God’. Rather, it’s a way of unfolding the causal relationship

and social interaction of ﬂoods as an ongoing ‘process’.

Shamra Mussalli, one of the performers of this

narrative, starts by breathlessly following the ﬂood waters.

He takes his listeners, through this narrative, to a ride

along areas and communities of once-wild Chenab river in

Punjab. Punjab straddles the region falling across Pakistan

and India and is a place with a long history and rich

cultural heritage.

It has been suggested that the Chenab has a similar

space in the consciousness of the people of the Punjab

as, say, the Rhine holds for the Germans, or the Danube

for the Austrians and the Hungarians. It is the iconic

river around which quite some amount of Punjabi

consciousness revolves.

But back to Mussalli’s work. His poem captures

the ﬂood waves gushing into the adjoining rural and

urban localities, and ﬁnally ends with the ﬂood waters

receding back to the riverbed. I ﬁnd this piece as an

irresistible example of an oral ‘reportorial’ comment

or understanding of what the ﬂoods meant in the area.

The longitudinal lens through which this folklore looks

at ﬂoods is what, arguably, is missing from the today’s

corporate-driven media –- particularly when it comes to

reports on recurring disasters.

Media, arguably, tend to be the victim as well as the

promoter of hegemonic ideologies, popular prejudice

and social stereotypes. Like rest of the events happening

everyday in our social milieu, the media largely looks at

disaster as an ‘event’, and at the best treats it as a hard

news.

There is a glaring similarity between the government

and media in the way both deal with disasters. A

quick review of the disaster management policies of

South Asian governments would reveal that the policy

emphasis of the governments in the region remain post-

hoc, focusing on emergency management and relief

distribution. Wittingly or otherwise, the dominant media

pattern follows suit when it comes to disaster reporting.

This has happened particularly in recent mega

disasters brought about by the Indian Ocean tsunami

in December 2004 and the Himalayan earthquake in

October 2005. There was a rush of camera crews to

capture the melodramatic content of the disasters in

the ﬁrst few hours and days; but there was little or no

news once the impacts of tides and tremors became

‘stale’. Though the survivors were still grappling with

the nightmares wrought by those fateful moments of

the tsunami and the earthquake, the media was simply

not around, eager or forthcoming to follow up the story.

Instead, they were all competing with each other to break

at the time of the disaster itself.

Swapan Dasgupta, then the deputy editor of India

Today, argued disaster reporting in India as having

traditionally followed a formula: “First there are the

gruesome horror stories, followed by accusations that the

government willfully connived in the disaster, followed

by the stories of how ofﬁcial machinery is insensitive

to the sufferings, followed by the alarmist fears of

epidemics and, ﬁnally, the expose of the wholesale loot of

relief material.”

Needless to say, such a focus does make a good

story for practicing journalists; but there are other

points which could make ‘disaster’ a story before it

has occurred. The question, however, lies in how we

perceive and understand disaster as a concept and as

an event.

Recent disaster studies have differentiated

between a ‘hazard’ and a ‘disaster’.

These studies maintain that a hazard is a natural

event but a disaster is not. The South Asia Disaster

Report 2005 suggests that “a disaster is the dialectical

upshot of development failures and socio-economic

imbalances manifested in the built- and natural

environment.” The report criticises the ‘dominant

perspective’ which believes that disaster is an interim

intermission that can be efﬁciently reversed with

emergency interventions largely based on rescue and

relief.

This is a stereotyped understanding of disaster,

which rules the imagination of state managers and

is being upheld by media in general. Yet, it has to be

questioned.

Nothing short of a paradigm shift is needed if one

is to get an alternative perspective on disasters: a shift

from emergency management to risk management.

This perspective suggests understanding,

investigating and exploring the social dimensions

of disaster. It involves focusing on the process of

ongoing development planning, state governance and

social organization of at-risk areas and communities.

A disaster event and its impact needs to be located

through a longitudinal lens as what makes some

communities and areas more vulnerable to disasters

and how disaster could change or transform the social

relationship at the country, community and household

level.

Broadly speaking, disasters can be divided into

two categories: slow onset and sudden onset disasters.

A cursory look at the media treatment of disasters

would suggest that sudden and macro disasters catch

media attention more prominently then the slow and

micro-scale disasters. One possible reason of this

trend strongly visible in the media can be seen in the

‘shock value’ of sudden and macro disasters. Micro

and slow onset disasters largely remain ‘missing’ or

‘invisible’ in media analysis and hard-sell stories.

Drought, for example, may not be as ‘sexy’ a story as

famine; despite the fact that we all know fully-well

that drought leads to famine.

Let’s look at another example. The consolidated

data of disaster-related deaths in Nepal covering

32 years (1971 - 2003) reveals that epidemic was

the cause of 60% of deaths, compared with 16%

from landslides, 11% from ﬂoods, four percent from

earthquake, three percent from thunderstorms and

six percent stemming from others causes. Similarly,

in the eastern Indian state of Orrisa, epidemics were

recorded to be one of the greatest causes of deaths.

A comparative analysis of data for 2005 reveals

that more people were killed in epidemics (748) than

with the overall development policy, planning and

implementation in Asian countries. It is pertinent to

note that these mega development projects are being

persued by national governments; and loans for these

projects are solicited from international ﬁnancial

institutions (IFIs) on extravagent commercial interest

rates. Closer investigations have revealed, particularly

in the case LBOD (as mentioned above), that these IFI-

ﬁnanced mega projects are causing disasters in terms of

ﬂooding, displacement and erosion of livelihood assets

of vulnerable communities of the region.

A disaster cycle can be divided into ﬁve phases: pre-

disaster; immediately post-disaster; short term relief;

recovery; and rehabilitation. Media have speciﬁc roles

to play in all these phases. Informing, educating and

inﬂuencing public opinion and policy towards disaster

risk reduction can be some untapped entry points for

the media in relation to disaster reporting.

For instance, in the pre-disaster phase of slow-

onset disasters, the media can bring the potential

risk into the public attention and highlight imminent

damages. In sudden-onset disasters, it can disseminate

preparedness information and send warnings to the

threatened.

In post-disaster situations stemming from slow-

onset disasters, the media can inform decision makers

about the concerns and needs of affected people and,

inversely, can inform the people about the government’s

policies and decisions. It assumes the role of tracking,

oversight and monitoring the relief process and can also

provide relief information to the people.

In post-disaster situations arising from sudden-

onset disasters, the media could identify the cause of the

disaster, estimate its seriousness, provide and double-

check damage estimates and detail the relief needs.

In the short-term relief phase, the media can

monitor the event, report relief operations, locate gaps,

obtain accurate information and articulate the voices

and interests of victims and survivors.

In the phases of recovery and rehabilitation,

the media tends to show a decrease in interest, yet

these are the times most crucial for digging out more

investigative stories, and unearthing the gaps in the

balance sheet of pledges and actual performances.

Recovery and rehabilitation audits by the media are

one of the under-reported issue, which could bridge the

information gap and ﬁll accountability needs of long-

term recovery and rehabilitation of disaster-affected

areas and communities.

landslides (287) in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan

put together. Yet, these larger killers continue to be

some of the most under-reported disasters in the

media. A certain tendency of ‘normalcy bias’ has

developed towards these disasters.

In recent times a new phenomenon of the

development-induced disaster is emerging in the

countries of South Asia. A report on development-

induced disasters by the Manila-based NGO Forum on

ADB (Asian Development Bank), reﬂects some of this

thinking.

While commenting on the US$ 62 million

Khulna-Jessore Drainage Rehabilitation Project

(KJDRP) of the ADB in the southwest coastal districts

in Bangladesh, Zakir Kibria of Bangla Praxis states:

“The project ignored environmental concerns raised

in the Summary Initial Environmental Examination

(SIEE) and embarked on a structural construction-

based design in an ecologically fragile river system.

The failed project has now left a legacy of social and

environmental disaster exempliﬁed by silted-up dead

rivers, permanent inundation of thousands of hectares

of land, loss of indigenous variety of ﬁsh and crop

biodiversity, and has driven ﬁsherfolk out of work.”

In another example, Zulﬁqar Halepoto of Forum

for Conﬂict Resolution-Pakistan stated: “The Left

Bank Outfall Drain (LBOD) project was intended to

drain saline ground of surface water and storm run-

off. Due to several technical problems, the drainage

efﬂuents, instead of going into the sea, started

destroying lands and internationally-recognized

wetlands. The project-induced problems include:

ﬂooding, sea intrusion, loss of crops and agricultural

land, reduction in ﬁsh catches and the loss of lives.”

On the Case of Urban Infrastructure Development

Projects in Karnataka, India, Gururaja Budhya of

Urban Research Centre-Bangalore indicated that

the implementation of urban development projects

in Karnataka shows that the ﬁve major challenges

in the Environment Policy identiﬁed by the ADB

have not been addressed; rather it has created more

complications. The poor are not part of decision-

making, institutional changes are top-down, the

project has contributed to the deterioration of

regional environment in the long run, no stakeholder

engagement has been conducted, and systems within

are not internalized.

These recent trends open new avenues for

investigative disaster reporting which are linked

On 26 January 2001 a devastating earthquake

measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale struck the Indian

state of Gujarat. The epicenter was in the remote

district of Kutch, close to the Pakistani border. Kutch

was cut off from the outside world. Telephone lines

were down, mobile phone networks were jammed and

the HF radio mast used by local Indian Air Force base

had been damaged. It took more than 24 hours before

communication could be restored.

This was not an untypical scenario and one that

humanitarian organisations and the media regularly

confront in the aftermath of major natural disasters.

The South Asia Delegation of the International

Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

(International Federation, or IFRC ) based in Delhi

was at the forefront of the international response to

the earthquake. Despite the information vacuum, a

well-oiled response mechanism swung into action. By

the afternoon of January 26, a preliminary appeal for

2 million Swiss Francs had been launched to assist

50,000 affected people. By 9 am on 29 January donors

had committed 4 million Swiss Francs.

Good communications played a key role in

mobilizing the funds so quickly. Within 24 hours of

the disaster, an assessment team -- which included

an information delegate -- had been sent to Kutch

from Delhi. Armed only with a satellite phone hooked

up to a car battery, the information delegate’s main

functions were to brief colleagues in Geneva and Delhi

and give interviews to the international media. For

over a week, the Red Cross featured almost daily on

CNN, BBC and other major news outlets. This level of

visibility sent a clear signal to the donor community

that they were on the ground getting the job done.

Good communication in a disaster zone depends

on many factors. Rapid access to the disaster zone,

professional human resource capacity and readily

available communications technology are among them.

The latest communications technology should be

integral to a humanitarian organisations emergency

response toolkit. Whether it’s an earthquake in the

mountains of Afghanistan or ﬂooding in Somalia,

a satellite phone is an essential piece of equipment

to maintain contact with the outside world where

conventional communication isn’t possible. Combine a

satellite phone with a laptop, digital camera and digital

video camera, and a humanitarian agency can become

a news provider from anywhere in the world. Web

stories and blogs can be posted on agency web sites,

and digital photos and raw video footage can easily be

made accessible to international news agencies.

Organisations such as the International Federation,

UNICEF and World Food Programme (WFP) all

recognize the importance of having experienced

communications staff strategically located in ofﬁces

around the world who are available to move into

disaster zones at short notice. With the advent of the

24 hour news cycle, humanitarian agencies quite often

ﬁnd themselves arriving at the scene of a disaster at the

same time as international news teams.

This carries advantages and disadvantages. How

many times have you heard the phrase when watching

the News …‘the aid effort is slow to get underway’? In

any given disaster, it always takes time to establish

logistical pipelines and the infrastructure required to

deliver relief supplies. But for the media, conveying

a mood of drama and controversy makes for a more

exciting news report.

Generally, the relationship between the media

and humanitarian agencies following a disaster is a

reciprocal one. The media need access to the story,

sound-bites and good story leads. Humanitarian

agencies need visibility and the opportunity to

broadcast their concerns to a global audience.

While the relationship is one of mutual beneﬁt, it

tends to be short-lived. Media interest in the Gujurat

earthquake plummeted after a week when journalists

moved on to the next story. In the case of the 2004

Asian Tsunami, media interest was sustained for a few

weeks, but some would argue this was largely due to

the numbers of foreign tourists who were affected.

A common frustration is that news reporters tend

to be very formulaic in their approach to covering

disasters. Reporters arriving from abroad rarely probe

beneath the surface to provide analysis of the wider

issues surrounding disasters, and it is seldom that

journalists return to the scene of a disaster to report on

how affected communities are coping a few months or

a year down the line. This is the nature of news -- the

humanitarian community needs to recognize that

they have a limited window of opportunity to get their

message across using the news media.

The disparity in funding per capita between

high proﬁle disasters and some neglected disasters is

alarming. Chronic disasters -- such as droughts -- are

difﬁcult to cover as news stories precisely because their

onset is slow and the visible signs of human suffering

that the media favour are often absent.

But the disparity in funding received for different

disasters is clearly reﬂected in the levels of media

attention that they receive. The Asian Tsunami raised

at least US$ 1,241 per beneﬁciary in aid, compared

to appeals for disasters such as the 2005 droughts in

Malawi and Niger which averaged less than US$27 per

person.

Although the media does have an important role

as a catalyst to mobilise public support, they should

not be held accountable for some disasters remaining

in the shadows. While donor governments have

their own decision-making criteria, media coverage

of a disaster can certainly inﬂuence donor policy on

whether or not they should intervene in any given

crisis.

Neglect is not necessarily a term that would be

associated with the outpouring of goodwill shown

by humanitarian agencies in their response to the

Asian Tsunami, but it is questionable as to whether

some agencies neglected to communicate sufﬁciently

with affected communities. Most International Non

Governmental organizations (INGOs) have signed

up to the Red Cross and NGO Code of Conduct

(see box on page 62) which provides a clear set of

guiding principles designed to regulate consultation

between humanitarian agencies and the people they

set out to assist. These principles stress the need

for consultation, participation and transparency

when planning humanitarian interventions. Reviews

conducted on the response to the 2004 Asian Tsunami

clearly demonstrate that many humanitarian agencies

made decisions based on experience and professional

judgement when dispatching standard relief materials

to the disaster zone. It was only when the chaos

subsided that assessments and consultations with

affected communities became more detailed and

provided more factual data. Under these circumstances

information is power and invariably aid agencies hold

the key as they make decisions which have a direct

impact on the people caught up in the disaster.

In November 2005, the International Federation

teamed up with CDA Collaborative Learning Projects

and other partners in the humanitarian sector to

launch the ‘Listening Project’

, which aimed to gather

the views and opinions of local people in up to 20

developing countries where international aid had

been provided after a disaster. The idea was to assess

the impact of international assistance and learn from

beneﬁciaries experiences.

The project began in Aceh, Indonesia, and

produced some interesting results. Seven teams of

listeners were designated different localities. They

didn’t work from pre-set questions; rather, the

approach was to move around, engaging a wide cross-

section of people, young and old, in conversation. It

was the beneﬁciaries who took the lead in raising the

issues that most concerned them.

It was apparent that in their response to the

Tsunami, NGOs overall had performed poorly when

communicating with the people they set out to help.

Many people were unhappy that they did not have

enough information about aid and aid processes.

Some couldn’t understand why different aid was given

to neighbouring communities. Assumed wisdom led

many NGOs to channel information to the community

through the village head man which wasn’t always the

best approach -- it created suspicions of unfairness,

and quite often the information failed to trickle down

to key groups, particularly women.

The Listening teams found that many people

felt there was no mechanism to express their

opinions or discuss problems with the NGOs, and

felt afraid to raise issues with NGOs. When asked

how communication could be improved, there were a

number of suggestions, such as more public meetings

or information centers where NGOs could explain

issues in greater detail to the community.

The Listening Project highlights how a lack of

beneﬁciary communication can seriously undermine

the credibility of humanitarian agencies, which, in

turn, led to a negative impact on the welfare of local

communities.

Surprisingly few agencies have genuinely

addressed the notion of accountability in their

aid delivery. Some would argue that upward

accountability to donors has taken precedence over

downward accountability to beneﬁciary populations.

Despite the heavy branding on most of the relief

materials that were distributed in Aceh, most of the

recipients knew next to nothing about the agencies

that had come to help them.

The response to the Tsunami in Sri Lanka

is a good demonstration of conﬂicting priorities.

Reportedly over 300 agencies arrived with

considerable funding and little knowledge of

working in the country. It was not easy to establish

coordination mechanisms at central and district levels

between an overwhelmed government bureaucracy

and NGOs whose main focus was to hit the ground

running. Because so many agencies wanted to stake

their claim to a corner of the country, and become

operational as soon as possible, opportunities to

share data, assessment ﬁndings and knowledge were

lost. Collaboration with local government and other

agencies became secondary, and there was wide-

spread duplication of efforts. Some villages received

multiple distributions of ﬁshing boats, while others

received countless assessment teams from different

agencies passing through their village asking the same

questions….with little or no material beneﬁts.

Providing information to survivors of a disaster can

have a signiﬁcant impact on their well-being by helping

to repair psychological damage and restore people’s

dignity. In post Tsunami Sri Lanka, the International

Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) deployed twelve

mobile teams whose function was to enable families and

individuals staying in welfare centres to make contact

with their relatives to let them know they were alive and

well. The teams visited over 300 welfare centres armed

with satellite and mobile phones, playing a critical role

at a time when communication by telephone was almost

non-existent.

Mass media plays a crucial role in disaster

preparedness and response. Radio was the sole

information source for thousands of families living

in temporary shelters in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami.

Many NGOs and humanitarian agencies tapped into

this by collaborating with public and commercial

broadcasters to produce public information

broadcasts that featured details of forthcoming

relief distributions, training opportunities or health

education messages.

Despite the lack of ofﬁcial early warning systems,

communications technology played an important role

in saving lives before the tsunami struck. There were

many reported cases of people-to-people early warning

via mobile phone networks. With the proliferation

of mobile phone use, text messaging (SMS) is being

looked at seriously in some countries for disseminating

nationwide early warning alerts. Other modes of

communication play a vital role in the Bangladesh

Red Crescent Society’s Community Based Disaster

Preparedness programme. Historically, the Bay of

Bengal is prone to highly destructive seasonal cyclones

which in recent decades have claimed hundreds of

thousands of lives. The Red Crescent has established

a no-nonsense approach to reducing risk for

communities living close to the sea. Working closely

with the Government’s meteorological department

in Dhaka, Red Crescent disaster preparedness team

tracks the movement and intensity of cyclones. If

the cyclone looks potentially life-threatening, Red

Crescent ﬁeld ofﬁces are alerted by HF radio. The

message is then relayed down by VHF radio to disaster

preparedness teams at village level where trained

volunteers equipped with loud-hailers and bicycles

set off through local villages warning villagers to take

refuge in the nearest cyclone shelter. The programme

has proved to be successful not only because it has

saved thousands of lives, but because it is sustained

through the active participation of volunteers from the

community.

The success or failure of humanitarian action

can depend on good communication. This is far more

complex than simply building good relations with

the media in times of crisis. Communications needs

of beneﬁciaries must be addressed in programme

planning and delivery, and humanitarian agencies

must place more emphasis on sharing information and

resources rather than competing for airtime. Agencies

also need to join forces to raise awareness around

neglected disasters that remain in the shadows. To

make all this happen communications must be seen as

integral to strategic objectives. Humanitarian agencies

need to make the necessary investment and should

explore new ways to engage their publics using new

communications channels and media.

If they don’t, they can end up in the shadows.

“My mom came before the TV warning. She

woke me up and said, ‘Waves’. She told me to move

to higher ground. My mom is faster than the TV!”

eight-year-old Beam said after a tsunami-evacuation

drill carried out in Thailand sometime in March 2005.

Her mother Sumontha explained that community

members did not always hear the warnings the

government broadcasts; it was the neighbours who

phoned them and made sure they evacuated from the

high-risk areas.

Beam was talking to a TVE Asia Paciﬁc ﬁlm crew

who had tracked families affected by the 26 December

2004 tsunami for months, and documented how they

were returning to normalcy.

Time and again, local community members

are the ﬁrst to join hands during an emergency

situation, and on a voluntary basis they help the most

vulnerable. Alas, few of these Samaritans are involved

in preparedness activities; nor are most able to adapt

available resources to disseminate much-needed

information, including alerts on when evacuees can

safely return to their homes.

This was the case in Indonesia’s province of

Banda Aceh, one of the worst hit areas by the 2004

Boxing Day tsunami. Aware of the isolated state in

which their region was at that point in time due to

the dreadful conditions on the ground, hundreds of

local volunteers quickly organized emergency relief

efforts. They succeeded in many ways, but developing

communication methods once again proved

challenging.

It was ten days after the disaster that a group of

volunteer experts from the KBR68H radio station in

Jakarta were ﬁnally able to arrive in Aceh, and set

up a community radio station. The crew was given a

crash course. They worked hard to ensure that much-

needed information (from religious messages and

encouragement to sharing data on missing persons)

ﬁnally got to the people. Had local volunteers already

received appropriate training, they would have been

able to set up the emergency studio in a period of just

six hours.

When disaster strikes, volunteers come to the

fore. Community members typically rally to support

one another. However they need to be prepared,

and their efforts need to be coordinated. Trained

professionals can provide crucial support by training

people in disaster preparedness and response, and

by helping to coordinate national and international

relief and rebuilding programmes. The United Nations

Volunteers programme (UNV) is often one of the ﬁrst

organisations to respond to disasters on-site. UNV

mobilizes national and international UNV volunteers

to support the immediate relief and recovery activities

of major disaster organisations and domestic

institutions.

Beyond the response phase, UNV works with

governments and other national partners in the

creation of community-level disaster preparedness

plans to strengthen their capacities and lessen the

impact of possible future disasters. UNV supports

countries in the development of disaster mitigation

programmes that incorporate the principle of

volunteerism for development and foster people-

centred preparedness initiatives in communities.

The idea of volunteers being philanthropists

and lacking in skills, or being young, fresh college

graduates entering the job market and seeking

adventure, is rapidly changing. The number of

international organisations mobilizing highly educated

and professional volunteers is on the rise.

Volunteers associated with United Nations

Volunteers (UNV), for instance, have ﬁve to 10 years of

work experience and are an average 37 years old. Their

on-site and online contributions are proving extremely

productive in ﬁelds as diverse as health, education,

human rights promotion, community development,

vocational training, industry and population.

Information and communication technologies

(ICTs) are other areas where volunteers are

contributing necessary knowledge and expertise. They

support in disseminating warnings, coordinating relief

efforts and implementing recovery and rehabilitation

programmes.

If communities are to brace themselves for

weather-related disasters, they need sufﬁcient

early warning mechanisms to be able to implement

emergency plans of action.

Some initiatives are happening on the ground.

As part of the World Meteorological Organization’s

(WMO) daily routine of weather observation, large

numbers of people volunteer their time to the

most basic level of meteorological prediction: data

collection.

Experienced farmers, ﬁshermen, pilots and

sea captains read hydrological and meteorological

recorders, measure rainfall and test climatic

conditions. They report their ﬁndings to national

meteorological surveys around the world.

Without these volunteer efforts, meteorologists

would have less access to information about

conditions in remote areas, impeding their ability to

provide accurate forecasts of weather patterns around

the globe.

Volunteerism has also served as an effective

communication support system in the wake of

disasters. In India for instance, a victim of the Gujarat

earthquake in January 2001 himself, Information

Technology specialist Hemang Karelia declined an

offer from a private consulting ﬁrm and decided

instead to help thousands of victims of the quake,

which had devastated his hometown of Bhuj. After

signing up as a UNV volunteer a few days after

the disaster, he took charge of the computers in

the control room and made sure relevant data was

collected to help affected people. Easily-readable

maps, which helped to track and channel the scarce

resources available in those trying times, were also

produced.

“It gave me great satisfaction to provide the right

information at the right time and direct resources in

the right direction,” Hemang recalls.

Before that, Sanjaya Mohanty in Orissa also used

modern tools in communication to take information

about government programmes right to the doorstep

of poor villagers, whose livelihoods were destroyed

ﬁrst by a cyclone and soon afterwards by ﬂoods

in October 1999. Furthermore, he established

information technology kiosks at a minimal cost to

serve as disaster management tools.

“Local communities are now able to access early

warning information about impending cyclones and

learn about new agricultural practices,” Mohanty

explains.

After the immediate response, there is always a

need to ensure a long-term engagement of different

parties in the recovery and reconstruction process of

areas hit by natural disasters. UNV volunteers working

as Field Reporting Ofﬁcers help ensure commitments

are met. They play a crucial role in the analysis and

dissemination of data, and are thus instrumental in

assisting communities to gain better access to services.

They also participate in meetings that serve as the

main channel for recovery information collection

and data sharing, and their reports and ﬁndings are

uploaded to websites accessible to any interested

person.

Kenyan-born Anita Shah ﬂew all the way from

her country to assist as a UNV volunteer in the early

days of the emergency operation in Sri Lanka in

2004. She made valuable contributions to emergency

information management.

“We channeled valuable information on damage

and losses, as well as needs, gaps and response

efforts. I compiled a bulletin twice a week on the

activities being carried out, and was able to provide

real time and credible information for planning and

decision making,” she recalls.

While volunteer contributions like these have

proven extremely valuable at the country level, there

is still a need to fully integrate them into strategic

partnerships, such as those aiming at communicating

disasters at regional levels.

International organisations engaged in

mobilizing volunteers should join forces and prepare

a database of volunteers with speciﬁc professional

backgrounds in ﬁelds such as journalism,

communication technology, disaster management

and public health, to respond to the needs of mass

media and other communication partners in times of

emergency.

The print and broadcast media would probably

welcome an extra hand that would assist in their

work and help ensure that reliable information is

promptly gathered or disseminated. Overloaded news

bureaux could greatly beneﬁt from having on-site

and online specialized volunteers carrying out ﬁeld

research, extending advice and even giving interviews

on disaster management or health recommendations,

at least until ofﬁcial sources are ready to do so.

Experienced “volunteer journalists” could also

be deployed on-site to act as team leaders for local

amateur reporters and photographers, and help

speed up the collection of data on casualties and

ground conditions. Information centres set up by

the specialists would ensure that latest news reached

main-stream media for broader dissemination in a

timely manner.

When disaster strikes, volunteers are the ones

who spearhead activities to support those most

affected. The ingenuity solidarity and creativity of

ordinary people are harnessed through voluntary

action. And since each and every human being

has the potential to volunteer, encouraging

and supporting their involvement in strategic

partnerships will enrich disaster preparedness,

mitigation and, ultimately, management.

There are good boys and bad boys out there, in

the big world called “Development”. Some full-time

“developmentalists” consider the media to be the

notorious bad-boys. To them, the media are largely

obsessed with proﬁt-making, their cardinal principle

is to reduce every reader or viewer or listener to being

a mere consumer; they cater to the least common

denominator; they are sensational; they distort reality;

and the media thrive on hyperbole while they also lack

sensitivity.

Developmentalists’ critics whine, they cringe and

their dirges reach high decibel levels when they lament

about the media’s alleged lack of conviction and total

disregard for the well-being of the society. They often

take it on themselves to “build capacity for the media”

and draw their attention to the speciﬁc issue on which

their own development agency is working at that point

of time.

On the other hand, journalists have developed a

pathological distaste to the development narrative that

emerges from the portals of various developmental

agencies.

Maybe this is understandable. Journalists

consider that their reports are ritualistic, cloaked

in the political correctness, but often not backed by

enough empirical data. Journalists think that the

development agencies are monochromatic in vision

and do lack the larger picture in their imagination.

So, this gap grows. There is a popular game

prevalent in news-rooms. It involves nick-naming the

development agencies in question based on the issue

they focus on -- ”the HIV- guy”, “the development-

index guy”, “the global-warming guy”, “the poverty

guy”, “the MDG (millennium development goals) guy”,

all labels referring to one or the other development

agency working on the speciﬁc theme in question.

Rarely have these organisations or their staff members

shown an interest in themes or issues which are not

directly linked with their own priorities of-the-moment.

It is not very surprising therefore that most

journalists consider the development agencies as yet

another set of self-serving institutions. Institutions

that are craving for media coverage, institutions which

shamelessly want a plug for the purpose of their own

proﬁle-raising, and institutions that are not above

board when it comes to that deadliest of sins — the

planting of stories.

The divide is nearly complete. The sole saving

grace is that both sides have not started wagging war

against each other. At least not yet.

So, how did this chasm come about? Are these

two arms of the society mutually exclusive? Is there

no space for interaction and mutual beneﬁts? Is it, at

Fundamentally, this cleavage is due to the

developmentalists’ inability to distinguish between

journalism and the media industry.

The media industry, though it claims innumerable

privileges, is still an industry with a clear focus on the

bottom-line. However, it must be noted that there are

any number of journalists who are alive to the crucial

issues confronting - humanity. They are constantly

on the look-out for a good story that would make

some change in people’s lives. They want to record,

document, initiate a debate, shake the policy-makers

out of either their slumber or rank opportunism,

research for alternatives, and open up space for

dissent.

How am I so sure of this? Well, journalism was my

chosen ﬁeld for some twenty-odd years, till I moved

on to the insular world of development, a couple of

years ago.

One never looked at journalism purely as a

careerist pursuit. I believed, and still do believe, that

the media are a site for the democratic mediation of

ideas.

It is important for any politically-sensitive person,

but one who is not a politician or merely a partisan

in narrow party politics, to reach out to the public

directly, to bare open his or her ideas and views

through the dynamics of media. This is essential

to ensure a place for those ideas to germinate into

something more concrete in the domain of the public

sphere.

Not for a minute had I any delusions about the

media being free from various pressures, ideologies

and political-orientations. I believe that anyone who

wants a space in the public sphere comes in with a

worldview, and with a clear motivation for pursuing

that worldview. One argues for that worldview and

is constantly engaged in the process of reﬁning,

redeﬁning and enriching that worldview based on

empirical evidence and sharpened by intellectual

input.

A crucial component of my political belief is that

there is not a single public sphere in an Habermasian

sense, but multiple public spheres; and a journalist

can play the role of a mediator of these public spheres

only when he or she operates in more than one public

sphere. This thinking inﬂuenced my decision to be a

bi-lingual journalist.

The trick in bringing the two sectors

– development and the media -- closer lies not

just in creating an institutional framework, but

in generating a vibrant human network between

development practitioners and journalists who work

on developmental issues.

Publications, channels or radio stations may or

may not share the concerns of the developmental

agencies; but individual journalists do. They use

three creative tools to get their stories published or

broadcast.

First, journalists always create a contemporary

peg to hang their stories onto. They know that stories

when presented with no sense of immediacy -- and

those having a shelf-life beyond the periodicity of the

publication -- seem ﬁt for the story-bank, from which

they are rarely if ever retrieved.

This is an essential difference between the

perception of developmental agencies and that of

the media. Developmental agencies always believe

they have generated a body of information that has

relevance for at least a decade. And the media looks

at everything from a perspective of the here and now.

The media always seeks a contemporary peg in order

to help its reader relate to the story by providing a

recent grounding. And that’s the reason the media

remains the best communication platform, while

developmental work remains mainly on the shelves of

the bookshop.

Second, people working the media are masters

of subtle subversion. They know how to mask a story

without losing its power or potency in overcoming

various forms of censorships to which the mainstream

media is often subject.

Censorship comes from the ownership, from

the state, from the market and at times there is even

self-censorship to tide over a current crisis within the

organisation or to cope with the Spirit of the Times.

Developmental agencies should therefore leave the

narrative grid of the story and form to the journalist,

and not to try and impose a politically correct,

sanitised version which fails to work, especially with

the readers.

Third, journalists also deploy their excursions in

erudition to bring forth a point closer to the reader, by

drawing parallels or hinting at similarities.

For this, they will obviously not be prepared to

use verbatim the developmental agencies’ ﬁndings,

recommendations, research and writings. Journalists

need to counterpose these with other claims, research

and writings in order to contextualise them.

One of the usual complaints against journalists

coming in from development agencies is that “we gave

them so much material but they used so little”. There

is a need here for the development agencies to reﬂect

why this happens ever so often.

Development agencies rarely bring journalists into

their universe at a stage which can be called ‘work-in-

progress’. They usually just come to the media with a

ﬁnished product. There is hardly any joint exploration.

When presented with a ﬁnished product, there is just

one alternative for a reporter — that is, to review the

product that is already done.

Imagine a scenario where journalists are brought

into the process right from the word go. There would

have been a series of stories, and when the ﬁnal

report of the development agencies is realised, that

may well serve as the winding-up story tracking the

entire trajectory.

A journalist is expected to report and not

just reproduce. Development agencies like their

versions to be reproduced to a large extent. This

becomes an assault on the journalists’ work-pride.

He or she would like to do a ﬁeld report, taking

a cue or two from the work of the development

agency. But, to merely reproduce a report is

seen only as providing a free plug, an unpaid

advertisement, and doing a stenographer’s job.

Let’s look at one story which had a massive

impact. In India, the Narmada Bachao Andolan

(NBA – the movement to protect livelihoods

of tribals coming under threat from a series of

major dam projects) has been campaigning on the

contentious issue of big dams for nearly two-and-a-

half decades. But, not once did Ms. Medha Patkar,

the moving spirit of the movement, fail to get the

support from the mainstream media. The media

has, in fact, been an integral part of this struggle.

This is true on many fronts. Whether in

terms of countering the government’s claim over

proposed dam projects, or in terms of generating

details of the area or mass of land that was to be

lost due to the raising water levels, or the question

of displacement, or on the lack of rehabilitation.

On all these issues, the NBA managed to keep the

media informed from the word go. In the process,

it managed to generate much debate, raise voices

of concern over many institutions, including the

apex judicial body, the Supreme Court of India.

Never once, did the NBA come to the

media with a ﬁnal text and ask them merely to

reproduce it. Journalists, on the other hand, were

informed of the NBA’s activities, they were given

details of the villages that are getting submerged,

and they were taken into conﬁdence even about

the nature of protests that were being planned.

NBA shared with journalists its own doubts,

vulnerabilities, and anxieties and often voiced

their fear that all their efforts may be futile. In

many a sense, it was a partnership between the

NBA and the journalists.

Though the NBA’s struggle may have

ultimately not yielded the desired results in its

entirety – the contentious dams were built, ﬁnally

-- what resulted from this fruitful partnership

was many a useful by-product. This included the

debate on the desirability of big dams in India,

the actual human cost of development, the need

for proper rehabilitation and re-settlement, and

wider issues concerning development-induced-

displacement.

UN agencies, donor agencies and international

development organisations should keep in mind that

media is not merely a conveyor of messages handed

to them by press ofﬁcers.

The prose of the development agencies often

has no people in it... it’s just numbers. They retain

their sense of critical distance; and journalists feel

slighted by the press releases that land on their tables

mostly without any scope whatsoever for veriﬁcation,

counter-checking and illustrative examples.

A good journalist always strives to a give a human

face to his or her reports. There are names, faces,

families, friends, and depictions of the local society

in their stories. By focusing on one individual,

the media makes the suffering of that individual a

metaphor of larger malady. It helps the readers to

understand the pain, hope and frustrations of the

victims.

In that sense, journalism helps people to retain

their dignity and not get reduced to becoming mere

statistics. If developmental agencies understand

this dynamics about the working of journalists,

then there is nothing that prevents a most beneﬁcial

partnership from ﬂourishing sometime in the future.

But that goal is some understanding away, still.

What is a disaster? How is it that some houses can

be destroyed by storm winds while others resist the

most frightening earthquake? Why do some people

need years to recover from a bout of localised heavy

rain, while others are back in business just a few

months after a major tsunami?

For risk professionals, disasters occur when a

potentially dangerous natural phenomenon impacts

vulnerable people (or their houses, organizations or

cultures) who then cannot cope with these natural

forces and their destructive effects.

What are their causes? As noted above, there are

causes behind nature’s potential to become a threat –

some of which we can hardly inﬂuence

. For instance,

we have no ways to avoid the normal movements of

the earth’s crust, which we call earthquakes, or the

differences in humidity and pressure, which turn into

typhoons. But society’s bigger weaknesses come from

its vulnerabilities

For instance: a lack of awareness about the

potential threats. A misunderstanding of how

development effects could end up causing increasing

risks. The unavailability of sufﬁcient resources to

build better homes. Inadequate or non-existent land-

use planning. There could also be the problems of

information systems not reaching the exposed people

to alert them on upcoming events. It might be due to

weak preparation or the lack of training and resources

to help those affected.

Information, education, and communications

are, then, essentials primary tools that could play a

vital role to reduce vulnerabilities, increase awareness

and promote changes directly or by inﬂuencing better

decision-making.

Most vulnerable communities have long learnt

to deal with disastrous events. There are many

examples of indigenous people -- who are probably

among the most socially-vulnerable groups nowadays

-- or ancient inhabitants of a region, understanding

nature’s messages of an event-to-come based on their

historical knowledge of nature’s behaviour.

This, for instance, was the case of some of the

Andaman’s populations, on the islands off the Indian

east coast, during the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

People in some of these areas rushed inland after

noticing the water receding from the beaches on 26

December that year. We technologists would call this

information an “early warning message”, one that

needs to be understood and acted upon.

Access to historical information about past

events is often one of the best mechanisms to prevent

death for many. That is why most of the participatory

approaches to assess risks at the village level include

in their initial steps a discussion and collection of

past events. This is the case with the approaches

used by the United Nations Development Programme

(UNDP), the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Asian Disaster

Preparedness Centre (ADPC), CARE, Oxfam and many

others that work on supporting local communities.

Such an approach allows one to know in which

conditions those events have occurred in the past,

where they normally happen, and who has been

historically affected and how.

Unlike information needed by a state government

or other national entities, “small” events are also

compiled at that stage. For a vulnerable community,

having one or two families affected can translate

into a disaster; and surely it is one for those

whose livelihoods have been severely destroyed

or jeopardized. The UNDP has been promoting

DesInventar (www.desinventar.org), a Free/Libre

and Open Source Software tool to collect, analyse and

present such historical data. It is being used in all ﬁve

tsunami affected countries, as well as in Latin America

and other Asian countries, to be able to go into the

details of past events.

Deeper risk analysis requires one to look for

additional information. There’s a reason for that: how

can we avoid an event from turning into a disaster

if we don’t understand its roots, its causes and the

parameters that creates it? Apart from the natural

phenomenon, the developments around which and

evolution of which are well known to researchers and

scientiﬁc institutions across the globe, digging into

the social causes such as territorial (un)planning,

productive activities that lead to the changing of

the environmental balances, building methods,

organizational structures, internal power struggles

and disparities, and the impact of external actors, are

some of the key factors needed to be incorporated into

a good risk assessment.

Tools like hazard-mapping, actors-mapping,

seasonal calendars, economical activities, an analysis

of social service providers (such as transport,

education, power, water and sanitation) and social

typologies, are then useful to allow communities

to better understand, express and explain their

knowledge of risks. All this is also essential to

document the reality of risks.

Unfortunately, all this information is not always

available at the community level, because it is

unknown by people there or unavailable to them.

Take the case of migration, involving people in

search of a better future, who opt to move to some

newly-created community or neighbourhoods, around

an important urban centre. They often don’t have

this past information to be able to build on their

knowledge of potential threats.

They wouldn’t know, for instance, how a river

would evolve during the rainy season, or they often

don’t even have access to proper construction

materials, basic health care, education or permanent

jobs. In many cases, they themselves risk being

affected by monsoon ﬂoods, and deliberately choose

to ﬁnd a way to survive in their permanent social

disaster (whether this is brought about by poverty,

illness, illiteracy, discrimination or something else).

Being the most vulnerable to natural events is very

often an indicator of a deeper social vulnerability,

inequity and discrimination.

To reduce risk, it is also essential to document and

understand good practices, not only as ready-to-use

technical solutions to imitate, but most importantly,

as social processes to replicate in different conditions,

searching for internal and external factors that will

trigger success.

Looking for, understanding, sharing, and adapting

good practices, building its own new ones from

others’ experience is certainly one of the best ways to

ensure proper ownership and sustainability of new

techniques, organizations and partnerships.

But information by itself is not knowledge. Just

being aware of a danger can cause more anxiety than

bring security, mainly if we know that nothing is being

done to reduce the threat. It is therefore imperative to

simultaneously teach, educate and train vulnerable

people and societies on ways to ﬁnd solutions, or

techniques allowing them to reduce vulnerabilities.

Because the human part of the risks are produced

by development choices, a lot of the decisions

affecting local conditions are not taken locally. Take

the example of market policies that can be a strong

incentive for patterns in agricultural production which

effectively lead to wider deforestation. Or, energy

policies that could modify a river’s ﬂow.

It is hence imperative to raise awareness, and

promote risk education among decision-makers,

highlighting the way a “development” decision

could either reduce (if its implementation is done

accordingly) or increase risks. Most of the time, it

is the latter which happens when risk knowledge

remains completely absent from the development

decision-making chain.

When Hurricane Mitch struck in Central America,

there were many cases of well-constructed bridges

being affected, even though they were strong enough

to resist the water ﬂow from mighty rivers. They were

meant to weather large ﬂoods upstream, but their

design was not done in a way to take into account the

highest historical rainfall! Such bridges became the

main cause for vulnerable communities upstream.

At the local level, many solutions are already

known. Education and training will range from

creating new (or restoring the old) agriculture or

forestry techniques to reduce potential landslides

on high-slope terrains, building methods to prevent

ﬂoods from damaging houses, early warning schemes,

ﬁrst aid, rescue methods and evacuation planning

to avoid the loss of lives. These solutions need to be

adapted to the local context, implying the translation

of documents. It would also help to produce audio

documents, incorporate cultural standards, and reach

the most vulnerable sections.

At the national, state or district level, with

decision-makers, awareness can be increased by

education and training on risk creation, by producing

assessment techniques to identify the most-obvious

risks using existing data, just as it is being done for

environmental purposes, allowing the emergence of

prevention or mitigation solutions.

Informing the general public on these matters is

also a way to produce pressure for better decision-

making. In 2004 in Panama, CEPREDENAC

and

the UNDP supported the Ministry of Finance while

modifying the normal government project-ﬁnancing

approval process, so as to train their project reviewers

on disaster risks, enabling them to add ﬁve questions

about risks, to be answered by any proposal: Is

the project zone prone to natural events? With

which frequency? When ﬁnished, will the project

produce new risks to other projects? If infrastructure

project, is it compliant with the seismic-resistant

constructions codes? Does the project consider

mitigation measures to reduce its vulnerabilities?

As we have seen above, the responsibility on

producing vulnerabilities and increasing risk does

not lie solely with the communities. Many decisions

affecting local land use or social mobility are driven by

local authorities, economical conditions and private

investments, national policies and regulations. In

some cases, these decisions are even taken in another

country (particularly in the case of trans-boundary

rivers’ management scenarios that produce ﬂoods

in the lowest part of the watershed). Knowledge

should then be used to communicate on an informed

basis, so as to promote “horizontal” dialogue and

open discussion between parties to look for solutions

after determining responsibilities. Development

strategies should always be the product of a wide

discussion, taking economic, environmental and

social interest into account. (Incidentally those are the

“ingredients” of sustainable development, as deﬁned

during the 1990s.) There should also be a special

place for discussing risks, as they also have economic,

environmental and social implications which show up

during disasters.

Information and communication are among the

main purposes of the media. Risks can be reduced

even before tragedy strikes by using informed cases

studies, success stories or examples of good- and bad-

practices. In these efforts, one could highlight existing

risks to enhance the dialogue between communities

and decision-makers.

It’s not enough just to report on the number of the

dead, and point at responsibilities after an event. This

is specially the case if one’s focus is building education

around prevention matters, and for empowering

communities with useful information.

Based on concrete examples, the media can and

should play a signiﬁcant role in letting large audiences

be aware of the risks. It can also play a useful task by

getting people to start to think of potential threats

before they occur, so that human development activities

might include vulnerability-reduction actions too.

Disasters, whether natural or man-made, used

to be phenomena that we read about, saw on the

television or heard on the radio after they happened.

Even the advent of cable TV and 24 hour news

channels did not change this.

Unexpected or unplanned, no one could accurately

predict where or when they would occur. Once they

did, our ﬁrst images and sounds usually used to be of

ambulances rushing into hospital with the injured and

the dead; bloody, ashen or mud-stained emergency

workers and survivors emerging from the chaos; an

aerial shot over the disaster area; an image zoomed in

to focus on a single detail (a broken toy, a frozen clock

or a single shoe); an animation depicting the lead-up

to the disaster and how it played out; sound-bites from

traumatized victims and various spokespersons; or a

news anchor struggling to be heard above the din of

relief work. Headlines the next day would scream out

the numbers dead alongside an image of the tragedy

-- shot by a professional photographer and purchased

for hundreds of dollars.

Large-scale disasters are growing. One the

one hand, global warming and unprecedented

environmental change are resulting in disasters

more frequent and calamitous than before. Natural

disasters such as earthquakes (Kashmir, 2005), ﬂoods

(Bangladesh, India and Nepal, 2007), landslides

and mudslides (Bam, 2003; Chittagong, 2007),

volcanic eruptions (Merapi, 2006), tsunamis (South

and Southeast Asia, 2005) and forest ﬁres (across

Europe, 2007) continue to severely affect the lives and

livelihoods of millions. On the other, the iconic images

of the London bombings (7 July 2006), the Twin

Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, Madrid

train bombs (2004) and the Bali bombings (2002

and 2005) coupled with hundreds of gruesome local

incidents -- including suicide bombings in countries

such as Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq -- are a stark

reminder that man made disasters, often the result of

terrorism, are a permanent feature of domestic life in

many countries.

But how do we make sense of such disasters --

their causes, their impact on those involved as victims

and perpetrators? How do we maintain compassion

in a world with competing human tragedies? Does the

increasing availability and affordability of Information

and Communications Technologies (ICT) -- covering

PCs, radio, mobile phones, blogs, SMS and the

Internet -- result in the coverage and awareness of

disasters qualitatively better than before? Or does

reportage across a hundred thousand websites and