? A massive earthquake of magnitude 9.0 hit Indonesia off the west coast of Sumatra on the morning of December 26,2004, at 6:58 a.m. Another earthquake of magnitude 7.3 occurred 81km west of Pulo Kunji (Great Nicobar, India) at 9:51 a.m. on the same day. The earthquakes set off giant tsunamis three to 10 metres high, which travelled 2,000km across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal. ? Two and a half hours after the first quake off Sumatra, the tsunami struck India's east coast. ? Energy released by the undersea quake: Equivalent to the explosion of 4,75,000 kilotons of TNT, or 23,000 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs. ? The tsunami also hit parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Some 2.8 lakh people were affected. ? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched Operation Sea Waves to aid Sri Lanka and the Maldives. ? Parliament passed the Disaster Management Bill in 2005 that institutionalises management and coordination of relief, rescue, rehabilitation and reconstruction. ? The Centre has given total relief assistance of Rs 1,717 crore with the state govt chipping in with Rs 2,786.53 crore. ? International agencies are heavily involved in the relief effort. The World Bank's Emergency Tsunami Reconstruction Project looks at building homes, reclaiming agricultural lands, strengthening fisheries infrastructure, animal husbandry and restoring public infrastructure. The Asian Development Bank's assistance looks at infrastructure. By N. Bhanutej The tsunami robbed him of his meaning for existence. Masilamani, of Aryanaatutheru village of Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu, earned his living riding the treacherous waves of the Bay of Bengal in his little boat. His little world comprised wife, Punitha, son, Sanjay, 5, and daughter, Sivaranjini, 3. But on the morning of December 26, 2004, The Wave came for them. The sea gobbled up Sanjay and Sivaranjini, whose favourite sport was to play on the waves in their wooden dingy. Masilamani and Punitha survived. The giant wave killed an estimated 12,405 people, injured another 7,000-odd and destroyed more than one lakh homes. Till The Wave struck, few in India had imagined such a natural disaster going by the name of tsunami, a Japanese word meaning harbour waves, could occur. Only later did they learn that a similar wave had hit India in 1945. That was too distant a memory for the administration to put in place a tsunami warning system like for cyclones, floods or earthquakes. Not only was the country unprepared for the tsunami, it was unlike any other natural disaster even from the point of view of relief and rehabilitation. While earthquakes and cyclones have epicentres, the tsunami had battered over 2,200km of coastline, causing major damage in Tamil Nadu and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The logistics of rehabilitation in the widespread tsunami-affected region was daunting. Not only were the fishing communities along the coastline affected, with seawater washing into agriculture lands, crops were damaged due to salination. People and communities that indirectly depended on the sea for a livelihood were rendered jobless. With fishermen fearing the sea, not a single boat ventured out for five months after the tsunami. The shock of the sea turning against them had to be exorcised slowly. Besides the task of rebuilding lives, there loomed the greater and more difficult task of healing minds. In Nagapattinam district, the worst affected, relief poured in with hundreds of NGOs rushing with cash and other help for the victims. However, without a uni- fied rehabilitation programme in the initial stages, chaos broke loose. With celebrities joining the effort, there was greater publicity about relief than relief itself. Real work began only after the publicity had died down. The scale of the disaster called for much more than the usual handouts. A comprehensive Tsunami Rehabilitation Programme was undertaken under a new Disaster Management and Mitigating Department set up by the state government, with 15 departments covering a wide range of activities from fisheries to slum clearance, as the nodal agencies. The large relief funding from the Centre was mainly through the Prime Minister's National Relief Package and the Rajiv Gandhi Rehabilitation Package. The biggest achievement appears to be in the housing sector. Over 53,000 earthquake resistant houses have been constructed for those whose houses were destroyed. An additional 50,000 houses are being constructed for those indirectly affected. The size of the houses are a uniform 325 sq. ft of built-up area for each family with the families free to extend them within the allotted land. The government also organised the people in the 13 districts identified as tsunami affected into 60,000 self-help groups of 10-15 women members each. Banks have been asked to provide a revolving fund for each group, and assist in imparting vocational skills like community resource management, micro-credit management, safety at sea (for fishing community groups) and formation of fish marketing societies. Akila, a Dalit woman in Thanjavur, got a loan of Rs 10,000, which she invested, in milch cows. "I had never stepped out of my house till my husband was alive. I thought it was all over when he died in the tsunami. The self-help group taught me the ropes. Life seems better," she says. The tsunami also brought health and educational facilities into focus. In Nagapattinam three new hospitals at an investment of Rs 4.5 crore each have come up. Besides construction of school buildings, Rs 300 per month educational scholarships are being given to 1.5 lakh children under the PM's National Relief Package. Surely, people's respect for the environment and its hidden forces has increased after December 2004. The same communities which opposed reforestation programmes along the coastline, actively cooperated in regeneration of mangroves when they saw that those portions of the coastline where mangroves survived quelled the impact of the giant wave. Another fallout is that given the magnitude of the relief programme, the government appears to have used the tsunami to take up all the work that was long waiting to be done in the region. Little wonder that the government called the tsunami an "Opportunity", a term which attracted a lot of flak from NGOs. While this mammoth humanitarian effort continues, the Centre set up a state-of-the-art tsunami warning system at the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) in Hyderabad. On September 12, 2007, INCOIS sent out a tsunami warning along the eastern coast, but withdrew it after the ocean activity, following an earthquake, proved to be minimal. Better safe than sorry. Every fisherman along the coast would agree. ?