Preliminary findings from a collaborative social-auditing exercise led by Martin Chautari’s research team has revealed a total failure of the Nepali state to analyse the information it has been collecting for decades to manage rescue and relief in an informed manner. State agencies, before the quake, had been known to demand every detail of its citizens’ life, often the same copy of the citizenship certificate or lalpurja innumerable times. However, just when they needed to remember those details and relieve people of their misery, the state seemed to suffer from a severe case of amnesia. Consequently, not only were people left forgotten to die in the debris, they were also allowed to fall outside the safety net and worse, left unaccounted for.

This severe case of amnesia rendered the state machine incapable of rescuing earthquake survivors effectively.

After the earthquake, local communities in the affected districts were left to dig out the rubble with their bare hands and use simple household tools to rescue the buried.

The security agencies—the Nepal Army, Armed Police Force and the Nepal Police—did arrive at the sites of disasters within hours. But they did so without any stock of critical information about the ‘zone’. They did not have household level topography maps; they had no idea about crucial entries, exits, or arteries; and they had no tools to handle fire or cut concrete and lift columns. After they reached the sites, they were seen asking about the location of the damage. Confused and poorly equipped, they appeared expendable to the community and thus, were pushed by locals to take extreme risks. In circumstances of war, such a careless order to march to the front would have amounted to a grave crime of putting the lives of one’s subordinates at avoidable danger. Perhaps the ordering officers know better.

A fatal start

A fatal knowledge gap existed in the emergency medical and paramedical relief provided in the first two days after the earthquake. In the Bhaktapur study area, where 98 (72 were women) died, the first batch of rescued people were rushed to hospitals as far as Dhulikhel on an ad-hoc basis. There was an acute lack of knowledge at the rescue sites regarding the availability of emergency care, specialist services, bed capacity, and medical supplies at nearby hospitals, resulting in unnecessary casualties, rapid deterioration, subsequent referrals, and severe trauma.

In the nearest first-stage primary health care centre (PHCC), the x-ray machine was under repair. Its emergency room, according to the in-charge, was ill-suited. The PHCC is reported to have set up a ‘UNDP disaster supply’ kit, which does not include emergency medicines, on day two. Several international medical teams also began arriving in the city from day two onwards. However, they did not choose to reinforce the existing health network or to coordinate effectively with PHCCs and hospitals. They brought dubious letters of credentials and the district administration accepted their assistance without scrutinising their specialty and the reason for their preferred sites of camping. One consequence of this general lack of information was the plight of a husband who had to rush his

wounded wife to several reputable hospitals in the Kathmandu Valley only to see her die without receiving timely care. That he had lost two family members before he was able to rescue her only left him more distraught by the system’s failure.

Both local and central government agencies in the districts have visual and tabulated details about houses and public spaces within their areas of jurisdiction. The land survey office has digital topography and cadastral maps that link to the owner of every registered household, and the access to open public spaces. The election office ‘knows’ how many adult members any household has. The ward offices of the municipalities and VDCs have multiple sets of data on members in every household. They also have details of vulnerable groups (senior citizens, children, people with disabilities, and other excluded citizens), including photos and contact numbers.

State agencies have been told about every significant event in the lives of Nepalis and about every relationship umpteenth times, and each time in a fully ‘attested’ manner. Yet, when the crisis struck, the very government agencies chose to not recognise their citizens. Damage assessment forms were filled up without requiring your name to be spelled correctly, the reported damages to be verified in-situ, or the details to be tallied with any pre-existing documents. In later days, the agencies, of course, expected you to be the applicant for any relief. The ward office, on receiving two related applications for the victim ID card and for the demolition of the fully-damaged homes, demands two copies of the citizenship and land ownership certificates. After storing five censuses of damages who knows where, it also expects you to reveal whether your home was fully damaged or partially, and to provide a witness to support your claim.

The Nepali state cannot remember what it has read when it moves to the next sheet of paper. It certainly cannot recall who you are and where you stand, as if that does not matter. It seeks to deemphasise the fact that structural inequalities tend to disperse the effects of natural disasters unequally in society.

Questionable classifications

The damage assessments, conducted by several different government and non-government bodies, were both techno-economic and socio-political exercises. Nevertheless, everyone from the template designer to the enumerator was aware that the categories of ‘fully damaged’, ‘partially damaged’, and ‘ordinarily affected’ needed more precise and measurable indicators.

But the lack of a feedback loop in the data collection mechanism meant that the forms were filled in with the false hope of getting just a ‘picture’ of the damages. As expected, the category of ‘partially damaged’ buildings turned out to be meaningless for framing appropriate relief and reconstruction policies.

The political class woke from its disoriented slumber to pounce upon the relief distribution and are now seizing this ambiguous category and fighting to reclassify damages as simply ‘inhabitable’ and ‘uninhabitable’. In some areas, it is arguing to treat all mud brick structures as ‘fully damaged’ in order to enable homeowners to claim the compensatory two lakh rupees. Its aim seems to be to recover some credibility among its constituencies by controlling relief distribution at the local level, and of late, the state restructuring agenda at the national level. The socio-political nature of the damage assessment is also obvious in the way these forms generated contentious information about the family number (household size or family size) and ownership versus use (who owns or who lives).

Similarly, the red, yellow, and green labeling was intended to disseminate knowledge about the safety of houses to the community. But the classification was founded upon questionable indicators. The technology and the engineers involved in the exercise seemed to forget that this is not an innocent application of science. The seemingly simple problem of sorting turned into an intractable problem of authority. The voluntary enthusiasm quickly degenerated into a farcical business. The national club of engineers, claiming to know structural integrity by ‘rapid visual assessment’, has now disowned the practice itself as images of several conflicting labels surfaced. Some buildings that were labeled safe in the business interest of homeowners and were paid for were publicly circulated.

Colluding with criminals

The key point is that the damage assessment was aimed at managing the effects of the disaster. It did not have any bearing on the knowledge about the design and construction of the buildings. Nor was it sensitive to the socio-economic context of engineering. The ‘rapid visual assessment’ seems motivated, in part, by an implicit collusion among the parties responsible for multiplying the loss of lives and property. It did away with any reference to the history of the make and use of the structure. The method relieved the designer-architects, civil engineers, the municipality officials, contractors, investors, and the approvers, from the burden of any sense of guilt.

The most evident archaeological mounds of such a collective lapse can be found at the relatively recent settlement in Gongabu. The assessors had every opportunity to document past errors there and possibly trigger the prosecution of those who helped build such killing fields. Instead, the deliberate forgetfulness made the pravidhiks party to the dalal criminals. The state officials, from the ward office to the department of buildings, again did their best not to remember the documents they had approved or recommended for building permission. Some officials went further and lost the incriminating files.

Ironically, the same government, which seems to have random access institutional memory, erects a new information architecture to plan its responses to the disaster. Reliability of the data is an issue. Some might believe in the truth value of statistical averages and might also point to the exigent context. But as a first-hand empirical exercise, verifiability of the collected data should not have been compromised. It has now become clear that the immediate relief distribution, as well as the mid- and long-term rehabilitation and reconstruction programmes both by the government and the market institutions, will be erected on this structurally defunct foundation. For instance, the Nepal Rastra Bank policy to compensate banks and financial institutions for their low interest rates on the home rebuilding loan scheme was framed in recognition of the estimated burden on state coffers. That in turn demands that the damage estimates be realistic.

Similarly, for the plan to provide temporary shelters for the earthquake victims to work, the structure of the supplies and demands of building materials, including the corrugated zinc sheets, should be fair. The ability of the state to ensure a fair marketplace depends entirely on the accuracy of its knowledge about how the sector behaves. The knowledge specifically includes, among other things, estimates of the industry outputs, the external and internal dependencies in the sector, and the organisation of the supply and distribution network. The ministries of commerce and supplies as well as industry officially ‘know’ the time performance of these manufactures. There seemed to be no linkage, however, between such knowledge and the manufacturers’ collective pledge to sell the zinc sheets at pre-April 25 rates. As has become apparent, an uninformed state has no control over the retail prices, which matter most to users.

Remembering thing past

The ground-level social auditing of the early responses to the earthquake shows that the state agencies decided to act wherever they wish, but their institutional memory, both of their own responses to previous disasters and of the information they had spent huge resources collecting, seemed to be of little use . The amnesia invited fatal consequences when disaster struck. Such a random attack of amnesia allows the civilian and security bureaucracies to pretend to be the all-knowing system at normal times, but pushes them into a chaotic fit of forgetfulness precisely when they need to recall every little detail to save lives under their care. Surprisingly, the role of 33 statistical offices under the Central Bureau of Statistics has not been investigated in the state’s failure to mobilise its stock of information.

There is also a need to question whether the Nepali state can be expected to deliver safety and security for its citizens without first being treated for its forgetfulness. We would have begun the painful cycle of treatment if we could hold both the bureaucracies accountable for all the losses they caused by acting as if they did not remember what they had been told innumerable times. The existing accountability mechanisms seem to be already institutionalised with the virus of amnesia. The media would have played its role, had it not frequently lapsed into the proverbial short memory syndrome. There is thus a need to scale up the social auditing exercise piloted in the three Valley districts to all affected districts. Doing so will help build the capacity to collectively cure the Nepali state from the random fits of amnesia it has been suffering from.

Raj led the Social Auditing of the 2015 Earthquake, a collaborative project of Martin Chautari, GalliGalli, Bookaholics and Act4Quake