If India really wants to be Super power, India needs to fix their Infrastructure.. Start caring about value of life more... Currently, I feel India is rich enough that they can rebuild City or Country on their own in case without any aid from outside.. However, No Country is Rich Enough to get life of its Citizen's back.. Nations can invest in preventing loss of life only.. Which is what India needs to next.
Fix building codes to ensure that newer buildings can withstand moderate earthquake and may protect residents in case of severe earthquake. I am sure that newer building codes must be enforcing it.. wherever they can, despite rampant corruption.. However, issue here is older buildings.. which were buit years ago without any thought about earthquake...
I can't blame western media for this news as exaggeration as I have seen these areas myself.. especially in older/northern Delhi.. I am sure things might have changed a lot already.. As people make money they start investing in future.. biggest of it must/should be in protecting life!!!
Here is detailed news from our beloved local Mercury News..
Despite warnings, leaders fail to work on improving safety
By Muneeza Naqvi
Associated Press
NEW DELHI — The ramshackle neighborhoods of northeast Delhi are home to 2.2 million people packed along narrow alleys. Buildings are made from a single layer of brick. Extra floors are added to dilapidated buildings not meant to handle their weight. Tangles of electrical cables hang precariously everywhere.
If a major earthquake struck India’s seismically vulnerable capital, these neighborhoods — India’s most crowded — would collapse in an apocalyptic nightmare. Waters from the nearby Yamuna River would turn the subsoil to jelly, which would intensify the shaking.
The Indian government knows this and has done almost nothing about it.
An Associated Press examination of government documents spanning five decades reveals a pattern of warnings and recommendations that have been widely disregarded. Successive governments made plans and promises to prepare for a major earthquake in the city of 16.7 million, only to abandon them each time.
The Delhi government’s own estimates say nine out of every 10 buildings in the city are at risk of moderate or significant quake damage, yet the basic disaster response plan it had promised to complete nearly three years ago remains unfinished, there are nearly no earthquake awareness drills in schools and offices and tens of thousands of housing units are built every year without any earthquake safety checks.
Fearing many buildings could lie in ruins after a quake, the Delhi government began work in 2005 with U.S. government assistance to reinforce just five buildings — including a school and a hospital — it would need to begin a rudimentary relief operation to deal with the dead, wounded and homeless. Six years later, only one of those buildings is earthquake-ready.
“At the end of the day, people at the helm of affairs are not doing anything,” said Anup Karanth, an earthquake engineering expert.
In its attitudes to disaster preparedness, India is like many other poor nations — aware of the danger but bogged down by both inertia and more immediate demands on its resources.
But Delhi faces immense earthquake risks. Last September, two minor jolts sent thousands of scared residents into the streets, and experts say a big one looms on the horizon.
As far back as 1960, after a moderate quake cut power and plunged Delhi — then a city of 2.7 million — into darkness, the Geological Survey of India advised that all large buildings in the capital needed to have a quake safety plan.
A series of reports by other agencies have expanded on that conclusion in recent years, but both the city and national governments have ignored almost all of the recommendations.
Some reports were ignored because of apathy, others because of shifting priorities. In a city and country growing at lightning speed with huge problems of poverty and hunger that need more immediate solutions, earthquake preparedness has never been at the top of the list. Some plans begun with good intentions simply fell by the wayside.
That’s what happened to the 2005 plan to prepare five important buildings in the capital for an earthquake.
Government engineers were sent to California to train. But the next year — with only the school made earthquake ready — all the engineers were taken off the project. They were reassigned to build stadiums for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, an athletic competition held in Delhi, said M. Shashidhar Reddy, the vice chairman of India’s National Disaster Management Agency.
Fix building codes to ensure that newer buildings can withstand moderate earthquake and may protect residents in case of severe earthquake. I am sure that newer building codes must be enforcing it.. wherever they can, despite rampant corruption.. However, issue here is older buildings.. which were buit years ago without any thought about earthquake...
I can't blame western media for this news as exaggeration as I have seen these areas myself.. especially in older/northern Delhi.. I am sure things might have changed a lot already.. As people make money they start investing in future.. biggest of it must/should be in protecting life!!!
Here is detailed news from our beloved local Mercury News..
New Delhi officials ignore quake dangers
Despite warnings, leaders fail to work on improving safety
By Muneeza Naqvi
Associated Press
NEW DELHI — The ramshackle neighborhoods of northeast Delhi are home to 2.2 million people packed along narrow alleys. Buildings are made from a single layer of brick. Extra floors are added to dilapidated buildings not meant to handle their weight. Tangles of electrical cables hang precariously everywhere.
If a major earthquake struck India’s seismically vulnerable capital, these neighborhoods — India’s most crowded — would collapse in an apocalyptic nightmare. Waters from the nearby Yamuna River would turn the subsoil to jelly, which would intensify the shaking.
The Indian government knows this and has done almost nothing about it.
An Associated Press examination of government documents spanning five decades reveals a pattern of warnings and recommendations that have been widely disregarded. Successive governments made plans and promises to prepare for a major earthquake in the city of 16.7 million, only to abandon them each time.
The Delhi government’s own estimates say nine out of every 10 buildings in the city are at risk of moderate or significant quake damage, yet the basic disaster response plan it had promised to complete nearly three years ago remains unfinished, there are nearly no earthquake awareness drills in schools and offices and tens of thousands of housing units are built every year without any earthquake safety checks.
Fearing many buildings could lie in ruins after a quake, the Delhi government began work in 2005 with U.S. government assistance to reinforce just five buildings — including a school and a hospital — it would need to begin a rudimentary relief operation to deal with the dead, wounded and homeless. Six years later, only one of those buildings is earthquake-ready.
“At the end of the day, people at the helm of affairs are not doing anything,” said Anup Karanth, an earthquake engineering expert.
In its attitudes to disaster preparedness, India is like many other poor nations — aware of the danger but bogged down by both inertia and more immediate demands on its resources.
But Delhi faces immense earthquake risks. Last September, two minor jolts sent thousands of scared residents into the streets, and experts say a big one looms on the horizon.
As far back as 1960, after a moderate quake cut power and plunged Delhi — then a city of 2.7 million — into darkness, the Geological Survey of India advised that all large buildings in the capital needed to have a quake safety plan.
A series of reports by other agencies have expanded on that conclusion in recent years, but both the city and national governments have ignored almost all of the recommendations.
Some reports were ignored because of apathy, others because of shifting priorities. In a city and country growing at lightning speed with huge problems of poverty and hunger that need more immediate solutions, earthquake preparedness has never been at the top of the list. Some plans begun with good intentions simply fell by the wayside.
That’s what happened to the 2005 plan to prepare five important buildings in the capital for an earthquake.
Government engineers were sent to California to train. But the next year — with only the school made earthquake ready — all the engineers were taken off the project. They were reassigned to build stadiums for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, an athletic competition held in Delhi, said M. Shashidhar Reddy, the vice chairman of India’s National Disaster Management Agency.
MANISH SWARUP/ASSOCIATED PRESS
If a major temblor struck, the collapse of the dense housing in the crowded northeast district of New Delhi would create an apocalyptic nightmare.
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