With the grim news of the Ebola virus and the spiralling trajectory of its human toll grabbing global attention, I could not but keep thinking over my own flight or fight reactions to a major health scare back home in India.
Indeed, it was a scary and close encounter as I, along with my wife and two young children, inadvertently passed through ‘Ground Zero’ of the September 1994 plague outbreak in the western Indian city of Surat, Gujarat state.
I was then the News Editor of the Baroda edition of the main English national newspaper in that region.
We were coming back by train after our annual holiday to our hometown in Kerala. On the way back, we broke our journey in Madras, and from there boarded the train to Baroda. We were one station away from our final destination after the overnight journey.
As we neared Surat, what greeted us was an unusual sight of thousands of people converging on the station, desperately trying to get into the trains that were already there. It was around sundown and Surat, one of the richest and yet also one of the dirtiest cities in India that is also the second-most populous district in Gujarat State, was smouldering with untreated mounds of garbage dumps.
I whispered to my wife that there seems to be a major gas leak or something similar to what happened in Bhopal, a decade earlier, as I could discern the desperation of the people who were fleeing. Little did I know that the same scenes were unfolding at the city’s bus depots and even on the highways.
As our train stopped, hundreds crowded into our compartment. These were clearly the migrant labourers and craftsmen employed in the petrochemical, gold, diamond, textile, silk brocade and gold embroidery (jari) industries and they were all fleeing the city.
Biggest shock
The train pulled out of Surat and all we could get out of those who had entered our bogie was there was some unseen pestilence in the air or water — a collective fear from which they were fleeing. As we got to the safety of home in Baroda, I rang up my office and that’s when I got the biggest shock. The civic authorities had declared that plague had broken out in Surat.
Over the next few days, panic and chaos began to spread as doctors fled from the affected localities. The official curbs on movement from those localities could not be enforced and there was a shutdown of all manufacturing units, schools and the like.
As the regional newspaper edition, we had our own logistical issues. We had one correspondent based in Surat, and he needed reinforcements. The chief reporter based in Baroda, who happened to be from Surat, did the daily commute. We had two photographers and they took turns to go there.
Recently, while chatting to my former colleague, the chief reporter at that time, he quipped, “we were taking tetracycline antibiotic like peanuts.”
The international reaction, coupled with export and inward foreign investment losses that followed, had a damaging effect economically.
Global headlines implying that a medieval scourge had been let loose in this vast populous country further dented the country’s image. But to India’s credit, within a couple of weeks, the epidemic was stopped in its tracks. Of course, with large numbers of migrant labour fleeing by train, there were cases of sporadic deaths in far-flung towns and cities.
What happened afterwards was a real eye-opener. Surat got a new civic chief nine months after the plague, and he turned around the city in record time. Now it was Surat’s turn to bask in the glory after earning the distinction of being the second cleanest city in India, after Chandigarh, in 1997.
Incidentally, Surat was previously known as Suryapur (City of the Sun). And the Commissioner who transformed the city was S.R. Rao — Suryadevara Ramachandra Rao!
Later, he did not forget to thank the media’s role as a watchdog and for creating awareness on the need for civic cleanliness, governance and health.
N.P. Krishna Kumar is freelance journalist based in Dubai.