India's Response Was Like Extending a Blank Cheque: Nepal

[PARIKRAMA]

India's Response Was Like Extending a Blank Cheque: Nepal
NEW DELHI | APR 28, 2015

Nepal today thanked India for extending a "blank cheque" and taking initiative in launching relief operations in the aftermath of Saturday's killer earthquake, which was followed suit by other countries.

Ambassador-designate of Nepal Deep Kumar Upadhyay also expressed concerns on "congestion on Kathmandu airport" that was hampering taking aid to the victims.

"India took the initiative in relief operations, which other countries followed. We are thankful to the government of India that it was kind enough to extend a 'blank cheque' after the shattering earthquake. It has done tremendous work to provide help," he told reporters here.

"The Indian government has also accepted our request for special trains to border areas so that our people who want to return to their homes can go there. The service will be increased as per demand," he added.

Upadhyay said "I know we are two (countries), but we are receiving support like we are one. There is no problem of coordination between us. The aid will have a positive impact on us. It's a matter of human emotions."

Expressing concern about the obstacles in the relief work going on in the Himalayan nation round the clock, he said one major issue was congestion at Kathmandu airport due to which flying down support materials and resuming passenger flights were getting affected.

"The Kathmandu airport has a parking capacity of just seven to eight planes. At present 30 helicopters are already stationed there, including 20 from India and a few from the US. So there is congestion and we are unable to welcome rescue teams and relief material," Upadhyay said.

And in this regard, the most important requirement was that the aircraft come, off load relief material and return immediately, he said.

"This will help resume normal commercial passenger flights. It will help reduce panic and boost the morale of the people as they will understand that the situation was returning to normal," he added.

Upadhyay said providing food and shelter was a priority and the focus will shift toward them as "hopefully all kind of primary rescue work will be over by today".

Upadhyay said Nepal will now move towards need based, targeted relief work, to ensure that aid material reach the affected districts, and do not just get wasted in Kathmandu.

"There is no dearth of relief material. It is our responsibility now to take it to the interior areas in the mountains, which have been the worst hit. We will airlift and road lift the material to those places," he said.

"Many friendly countries are also trying to help, but we are holding them back due to congestion on our airport," he added.

Upadhyay expressed confidence that electricity supply will be restored to an extent as Power Grid officials from India and Nepal are continuously working towards it.

"Restoration of power supply will also lead to restoration of communication and lift the spirits of the distressed people there," he added.

The Nepal Ambassador said that many NGOs based in India were trying to lend a helping hand, but advised a note of caution for the sake of better coordination in the relief work.

"The NGOs have shown much concern. We are requesting them to come in a proper way. We will ask what kind of help they want to provide and then recommend and guide them. This way they will be able to help more," he added.

Upadhyay said the Nepal Consulate in Kolkata is also coordinating with relief agencies and NGOs for the purpose.

The Nepal Embassy has set up a toll free helpline 18002700032 for people affected by the earthquake. It has also created a Facebook page 'Nepal Embassy, New Delhi' for the purpose.

The embassy has also set up its own relief fund welcoming monetary donations from individuals who want to provide help to the people of Nepal.

India's Response Was Like Extending a Blank Cheque: Nepal | Apr 28,2015

 

[Phoenix89]

We stand with our brothers in this difficult time. So good to see governments proactive approach in helping Nepal.

 

[PARIKRAMA]

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 1h1 hour ago
#NepalEarthquake Without Words: Expressions during rescue sorties of MI-17 of IAF.

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 2h2 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Synergy in Action: Stretchers r ready to rush casualties to MH near KTM, evacuated frm remote areas.




Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 3h3 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake One C-17 a/c with 248 pax and an IL-76 with 66 pax and 7 mortal remains arrive at Palam this morning from KTM.

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 11h11 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Casualty evacuation from Trishuli Bazar to Kathmandu.

 

[PARIKRAMA]

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 11h11 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake There was a rush for evacuation from Trishuli Bazar to Kathmandu by a MI-17 helicopter of IAF.



Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 11h11 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake ...115 casualties shifted, 23 personnel of medical & engineering team inducted.




Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 11h11 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Helicopter effort today: Sorties-35, 10.3 tons of relief material, 86 persons evacuated...



Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 12h12 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Nepalese Army personnel loading a MI 17 helicopter of IAF with relief material.

 

[PARIKRAMA]

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 12h12 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Indian Army Engineers Regiment move for deployment under guidance from Nepal Army.




Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 12h12 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Casualty Triage Centre set up by Army Medical Corps at Kathmandu Air Base to aid the rescued people




Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 13h13 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake 19 mountaineers evacuated from Lukla by the IAF today.

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 13h13 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake IAF has so far evacuated 2865 persons frm Nepal 2 India by 36 sorties & airlifting 238.5 tons of relief & equipment 2 Nepal

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 14h14 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Total Number of Helicopter sorties today: 35 (by 7 PM); Cumulative-120

 

[PARIKRAMA]

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 14h14 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Helicopter sorties 2 remote areas r being carried out on the advice of Nepal Army: DefSecy RK Mathur



Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 14h14 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake All Rotary and Fixed wing flts in rescue and relief ops r being done in consultation with Nepalese govt.: DefSecy RK Mathur

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 16h16 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake An AN-32 aircraft with 2 tons of food material lands at Pokhara airfield.



Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 16h16 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Essential items being loaded into IAF aircraft at Palam for the quake victims in Nepal.

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 16h16 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Indian Navy chips in. A 16 member medical team, including 6 doctors & 10 assistants will be flying into Nepal tonight.

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 16h16 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Arrivals by IAF flights from Kathmandu at Palam today.

 

[PARIKRAMA]

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 22h22 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Arrival of passengers from Kathmandu at Palam by C-17 Globemaster III this morning-2.

Sitanshu Kar @SpokespersonMoD · 22h22 hours ago
#NepalEarthquake Arrival of 207 passengers at Palam from Kathmandu by C-17 Globemaster III this morning.

 

[PARIKRAMA]

Human Crisis In Nepal Fuels A Cultural One
KATHMANDU, NEPAL: On Kathmandu's Basantapur Durbar Square on Tuesday, a heavy wooden beam was slipping down what was left of the Maju Dega Temple.

Members of a volunteer search-and-rescue team were clambering up and down the temple's base, using the beam as a stepladder and occasionally sending a shower of bricks crashing onto it. It would end up on a pile of timber, in a square traversed by people, exposed to the rain.

If you worked as an antiquities dealer, you would note certain things about the beam: It was intricately carved with the image of two deities and possibly dated to the 17th century - the kind of piece that could sell for many thousands of dollars at an auction house in the West.

In the three days since a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal, the death toll has mounted so quickly, to more than 5,000, that most concerns other than the health and safety of its people have been put aside. Hope for finding survivors was waning, and tens of thousands of people are living in tents despite heavy rains. Reserves of clean water are running low.

But in the meantime, in many places, the detritus of centuries-old temples and palaces has been left unguarded, diminishing chances to eventually rebuild one of the world's largest clusters of cultural heritage sites. Pedestrians, possibly for sentimental value, are walking away with bricks from the 19th-century Dharahara Tower, which crashed to the earth Saturday, trapping at least 40 people inside.

On Monday, after a citizen called an official in Nepal's Department of Archaeology to report having thwarted an attempt to steal a bronze bell from the roof of a temple here in the capital, the authorities took some first steps to guard against looting. A notice was printed in a local newspaper Tuesday, warning that anyone taking artifacts would be punished.

But there was also a sense of helplessness at the magnitude of the calamity that has befallen the Kathmandu Valley, a place meticulously documented by preservationists and named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979.

"Nobody is really able to do this - the government not, UNESCO not, so I think all have to work together," said Christian Manhart, the head of UNESCO's office in Kathmandu. "There are thousands of sites, and we cannot put a policeman or military on each of the sites 24 hours a day. They are needed for other purposes. So it's impossible, as you can imagine."

UNESCO's top official, Irina Bokova, said in an interview Monday that she was unaware of any natural disaster in modern times that had damaged so much cultural heritage.

A dull, deep sadness hung around the valley's most celebrated neighborhoods this week. Two days after the earthquake, a steep, narrow street in Bhaktapur, an ancient pink-brick city several miles from Kathmandu, had been so completely abandoned by its residents that a visitor could hear no sound except pigeons cooing.

A glance up explained why: cracks zigzagged up the faces of the brick houses, tall, elegant structures with carved windows, some of which had toppled inward Saturday, crushing the people inside. Occasionally Tuesday, residents would dash in to grab bags of rice or other supplies, but their fear was still so intense that they would not stop to talk.

Sitting on a curb on Yalachhen Street, in no hurry to go anywhere, was Kishor Rajbhandari, who sat gazing at the house that had belonged to his family for three generations.

"This is my house," he said. "It's almost gone. Outside it looks all right, but inside, there are cracks in every corner. If the next 6.5 comes, it goes out."

The city of Kathmandu was built at the intersection of two trade routes linking China and India, and its architectural heritage reflects overlapping influences: miniature Buddhist votive structures from the seventh century, decorated with fine brass and wood carvings; tiered temples made of fired red bricks; monasteries, religious complexes, palaces, courtyards and clusters of tile-roofed homes.

The destruction has been overwhelming. UNESCO has said temple complexes in Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan are almost destroyed. At Basantapur Durbar Square on Tuesday, teams of volunteers were shoveling debris off the foundations of two temples that had collapsed Saturday; ambulances arrived to remove two bodies the volunteers found. A few police officers stood in the square but made no attempt to supervise the effort.

"There is no organization whatsoever," said Kaitlin Bull, 22, a tourist from Canada who spent four hours helping clear rubble off Maju Dega. "It's just a free-for-all."

In the hurry to remove the rubble, carved beams and struts had ended up in piles of scrap wood, although a few particularly beautiful carvings - like one pink-stained piece showing women frolicking acrobatically below two smiling gods - had been set aside.

Anil Adhikari, a police inspector at a station in the square, said that the only arrests for looting in the square were of eight teenagers who had planned to sell wood carvings at an antiques market. Outside the police station, Adhikari had collected about a dozen statues of gods and goddesses.

Officials said that the issue of looting had taken on more urgency in the past several days, but each seemed to hold another agency responsible for securing the sites.

Adhikari said his police station had informed officials from the government's Archaeology Department of the treasures in the rubble, but the department's officials had not come.

Chandra Mani Adhikari, a member of the government's national planning commission, said he had instructed the department to "take action to preserve all these things quickly."

The director general of the Archaeology Department, Bhesh Narayan Dahal, for his part, said he had visited the city's police and district officer and "requested him to please provide more and more security in that area."

He had also given orders for the warning against looting to be printed and broadcast and told staff members to visit heritage sites and lock up artifacts in a museum for safekeeping.

"I am too much worried," he said. "How can I tell you? I am too much worried. How will we save our heritage?"

But that was a subordinate worry on Tuesday in Basantapur Durbar Square, where volunteers were intent on removing the last bodies from the dusty rubble. Shortly after noon, they discovered one, a Nepalese man who was found on his chest, apparently crushed when he tried to run down the temple stairs.

Thomas Bell, a journalist and the author of "Kathmandu," a 2014 book about the city, was watching the volunteers toss down carved beams, which landed atop each other in a cloud of dust. The beams, he said, should be immediately cataloged, stored and protected from further damage.

In Nepal, "people don't necessarily place a great deal of value on a piece of wood just because it's old," he said. "But if you were to restore the temple, you would want it back."


© 2015, The New York Times News Service
Human Crisis In Nepal Fuels A Cultural One

TIMES NOW ‏@TimesNow 3m3 minutes ago
Cabinet Secretary to chair meeting of National Crisis Management Committee to review rescue & relief ops at 11 am. #NepalEarthquake.

Current Affairs
Nepal Earthquake-The Big Picture

Nature for all its enthralling beauty can be excruciatingly cruel at times. The denizens of Nepal are slowly recuperating from the devastating earthquake which struck at the heart of the beautiful but poor nation on Saturday. Here are four points which highlight the cause and effect of the most destructive calamity in these parts since 1934:

• Travel and Tourism contributes a large portion to Nepals economy and Nepal owes much of that to the splendid Himalayas. But Himalayas also trigger catastrophes such as earthquakes and avalanches. The Himalayas have been formed by the movement of tectonic plates- the Indian sub-continental plate moving towards and gradually over the Eurasian plate over millions of years resulting in its formation. This started more than 40 to 50 million years ago, resulting in the formation of a fault line, movements over which is continuous. According to geological data the Indian plate moves 5 centimeters or 2 inches a year along the fault line which runs across Southern Nepal. This movement builds up energy and heat due to friction and on saturation, leads to large scale emission in the form of an earthquake.
• The earthquake which shook Kathmandu valley just before noon on Saturday was measured at 7.9 in the Richter scale, and it emitted shockwaves whose power equalled 20 thermonuclear weapons, according to scientist. Originating around 9 miles beneath the surface, it was a relatively shallow quake, resulting in greater damage and multiple aftershocks. As a result of Saturdays outburst, the Indian sub-continental plate jumped forward by about 2 meters; hopefully satiating it for some decades. But the scientific observations suggest that the continuous shifting of tectonic plates would always keep the Himalayan region susceptible and one major earthquake every 75 years is to be expected. The cradle of the beautiful nature is duplicitous-it is also the seat of its fury!
• The earthquake has caused irreversible damage to life and property; the death toll in Nepal alone has crossed 4500. Hundreds are trapped in, and thousands lie injured in the debris. Millions have been rendered homeless, waiting forlornly for relief, medication, food and news about loved ones to arrive. Rain is compounding their misery, interspersed with aftershocks. The heritage of Kathmandu lies in ruins with Dharahara tower, Kalmochan temple and the Krishna temple reduced to rubble. The famous Durbah Square has been demolished, as if lynched by Nature.
• But the scale of decimation could have been less. Poor as it is, Nepal is one of the world leaders in growing urbanization and development with the population in capital Kathmandu rising at 6.4% every year. The infrastructure to support that scale of development is sadly lacking as the newly migrated populace build and occupy modest shelters which dont comply with safety standards. The public structures, both governmental and religious, are not much better. This leaves a huge portion of Nepals 27.5 million population susceptible to natures wrath. The government has to rebuild wisely, investment on safety and disaster relief should be given paramount importance. The simmering energy underground starts building soon after an outburst in anger, and for the sake of civilization, let us hope that mankind would be better prepared to cope the next time it vents.

Nepal Earthquake-The Big Picture

UNICEFVerified account‏@UNICEF
A girl with safe drinking water at UNICEF-supported informal camp in Kathmandu. #NepalEarthquake. @unicef_nepal

 

[ravi kiran]

Nepali are our Brothers. We will be always there to help our brothers.

 

[Azz Kikr]

Nepali brothers have bled for us in our wars, its payback time for us though no matter what we do for them we will always remain indebted to them.

 

[tsinga]

Everything possible will be done to help Nepal.

I have also now personally donated to the relief fund.

 

[Techy]

Nice landing! IAF's MI 17 V5 helicopter reaches Ilampokhari, near Pokhara with relief materials.

 

[Abingdonboy]

Indian Army Nepal relief ops:

Engineer Task force:

Army Aviation:

 

[Abingdonboy]

Army Medical Corps (AMC):

 

[COLDHEARTED AVIATOR]

We should do whatever is possible..Nepalese soldiers have won so many battles for us.