Gujarat's catastrophe

摘要

When earthquakes strike and lives are lost on a terrible scale, a middle way must be found between two kinds of false consolation. One is to imagine that nobody was to blame, to say that "natural disasters" cannot be prevented, and can only be endured. The other is to say that the deaths were all the fault of the system and the people who run it, that everything would have been all right if only the building regulations had been adequate, if the inspectors had not been corrupt, if the rescue services had been properly equipped and prepared, and so forth. The truth is, an earthquake in a country as poor as India is always going to be an unspeakable tragedy. At the same time, there are things that even poor countries can do to save lives in these circumstances—things that they often neglect to do.