Nearly a year after the Gorkha Earthquake, the government is waking up to the fact that it may have underestimated the tasks ahead and may have perhaps gone the wrong way about reconstruction, particularly about the more than 700,000 houses that need rebuilding. As the prospects of any meaningful reconstruction before the second monsoon since the earthquake appear bleak, the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) has started considering a Plan B to help thousands of victims get through the rainy season by building transitional shelters.

After wasting three precious months on strategising and developing a recovery framework, the NRA now suddenly feels that it has to be more pragmatic. The concept of transitional shelters in a post-disaster environment is not new. It was first used after the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004. It supports an incremental process of rebuilding homes that can support affected communities over a longer term. In fact the idea was floated by humanitarian agencies in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, but then the government felt that it was more realistic to hand out cash for temporary shelters than to be involved in construction.

No thought was put into incremental improvement of the temporary shelters to become transitional homes. The Rs15,000 in cash for temporary shelters that the government doled out to each family did offer some protection against the monsoon, but was ineffective against the winter as the shelters were made of nothing more than a few zinc sheets and bamboo poles. The difference between a temporary home and a transitional home may appear semantic in nature. However, the real difference lies in how thought out the initial shelter design is for incrementally improving the shelters and making them habitable for a longer period before the permanent reconstruction.

The lack of foresight here appears staggering. Despite the abundance of literature on how post-disaster reconstruction takes longer than anticipated, the government failed to take up the idea of transitional shelters last summer after the earthquake. As a result, more of precious time and cash will be wasted in implementing a Plan B, which should have been Plan A in the first place. A lot of jargons like ‘winterisation’ and ‘rain proofing’ of temporary shelters were thrown around, but little was done on the ground to actually improve those shelters to guard against the harsh weather.

The current delays stem from two reasons—the NRA’s inability to hire staff and timely verification of the damaged homes. In both instances, there is clear evidence that the cart has been put before the horse. Instead of solely relying on government deputation, the NRA should have gone for competitive hiring for over half of the positions, while drawing current government employees for liaison and coordination roles. On verification of homes, the NRA could have begun disbursing conditional instalment of cash assistance to begin home reconstruction with a caveat of strong legal actions against those making fraudulent claims. Donors may have disagreed but if there was assurance that money would be accounted for within the next

fiscal year, they would have consented. The whole reconstruction approach has been botched from the start and the NRA needs to change it before the second monsoon strikes.