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| Indo-Pak cooperation sought | | |
Oct 8 (Dehradun)
It has been a year since the earthquake brought Kashmir to its knees.
But few lessons, if any, have been learnt by India and Pakistan.
Most interaction between the two countries centres around terrorism and hardly a word is spoken about this silent, but deadlier enemy.
When over a hundred top Indian scientists gathered at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun, the need for closer cooperation to better understand earthquakes was stressed.
After all, the risk of large earthquakes is very real in the Himalayas, as demonstrated by the Muzaffarabad earthquake, which killed 75,000 people.
Very much like terrorism, earthquakes and fractures in the Earth's crust, also known as fault zones, do not respect national boundaries.
The need of the hour, scientists feel, is a common mechanism that needs to be evolved jointly by India and Pakistan.
Unfortunately at the moment, scientific co-operation is minimal and this is largely because of fears on both sides that sharing seismic data would compromise national security and be a dead giveaway of nuclear tests.
But it's a fear that has been eclipsed by the greater fear of when the earth shakes.
"Earthquakes don't know any political boundary and the more transparent we become and the more data we exchange, the better off we will be," said Harsh K Gupta, Former Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences.
In the last 15 years, five major quakes shook the Himalayas. More can and will strike in the future. Yet, most fracture zones haven't even been mapped accurately.
A major handicap is limited access for scientists to border areas, given the military's control.
Scientists entering these areas with survey equipment and high-resolution maps are viewed with suspicion.
To unravel these earthquake hot spots, scientists need to map active faults, placing a dense network of seismographs, hoping to listen in on the Earth's murmurs that precede a major earthquake.
Today, the only operational earthquake observatory is in Srinagar and it's obsolete. Therefore, quality data is hard to come by.
Common enemy
The dialogue process between Indian and Pakistan may be inching forward, but both countries are barely talking on ways to thwart the common enemy of earthquakes.
There may be some hope now as both countries are beginning to realise that cooperation is the best way forward.
"Sometimes, our efforts are restricted because we do not have the data from all sides and hence it is important and we realise and our neighbours also realise, including Pakistan, that we have to merge the datasets together," said B R Arora, Director, Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology.
"We have started coming together and probably, it is not too far when we will be sitting on a common table and discussing the problem of natural hazards in a collective manner," he added.
The hope of scientific cooperation is very real, even though the talking heads have only just begun to come together. |
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