NRI
(non-resident Indian) lady carrying a little baby
slamming Air India outside Delhi airport, it made
me think. The images (on NDTV) of an emotionally-charged
young woman holding a fourteen-month-old baby and
saying she was not
provided with food or water and was asked to wait
for 48 hours for a flight from Delhi to Chennai was
very damaging to Air India.
Mumbai, Aug 04, 2005
Ramesh Narayan
The Hindu Business Line
What happened in Mumbai last week
was a disaster. The downpour was bad enough, but what
compounded the problem was a failure to communicate
the right things at the right time.
CRISIS management and disaster management
are buzzwords that one keeps reading in the media
these days. Actually, the difference between the two
terms is very important. A crisis and a disaster are
two very different scenarios. They are separated by
a gulf that increases in almost geometric progression.
Last week Mumbai suffered what could
only be called as a disaster. In fact, as I key in
this column, Mumbai is just about coming up for air.
As everyone must have read about and seen on TV, Mumbai
experienced a deluge of record-breaking proportions.
Ninety-four cm of rain in a day makes Cherrapunji
look arid.
And the disaster was not just something
caused by nature. The human hand, or the lack of it,
was very much a part of it.
Let us make some observations, ask
a few questions and see if some answers could emerge.
To begin with, on that fateful Tuesday
when the heavens were about to burst, no one had any
idea of what could have been in store for them. Sure,
weather forecast is a difficult task at the best of
times but repeatedly communicating on the next day
(Wednesday) that very heavy rains were forecast for
the next 48 hours was ensuring that the wrong forecast
of the previous day was being compounded with another
wrong forecast the next day. The former, had it been
right, could have saved lives. The latter, by being
wrong, only served to spread panic.
The mobile telephone network failed.
One is accustomed to a situation where water logging
affects the cable network of landline service providers.
What was the excuse of the mobile providers where
air is the medium?
The communication failure was compounded
by the CEO of one of the mobile networks self-righteously
proclaiming that his network was working fine. The
viewers whose mobile phones were on the blink must
have experienced a few harsh thoughts about the gentleman
and his network. In the face of disaster, sanctimonious
half-truths do not help the image of the service provider.
A fair part of the problem was a communication
failure on the part of many people.
The police force made a cardinal mistake
by being invisible that Tuesday evening when thousands
of people were stranded in cars and many were abandoning
cars recklessly, further exaggerating the monumental
traffic snarls.
Sheer visibility is a very reassuring
factor for a force like the police. It needed the
Chief Minister to say that he had instructed the force
to be more visible, the next day.
The Municipal Corporation was flashing
helpline numbers on TV channels on Thursday. This
should have been done on Tuesday itself. A clear failure
of communication.
In fact, the media (those that use
the air waves) were a great help to those who were
literally starved of information. FM stations and
TV channels were the only medium of communication
to connect many hapless commuters.
They gamely broadcast or telecast
SMS messages and hopefully did what the normal communication
channels should have done.
What about departments that take care
of things like schools? TV channels sporadically displayed
messages declaring that schools were to remain closed
for "the next two days." Instead, a Government
department should have clearly announced on TV the
closure of schools and colleges. This simple communication
could have helped harried parents from further piling
up calls on the already strained telecom network.
The Chief Minister was very visible
on the TV channels explaining the enormity of the
disaster, and enormous it was. Yet the stage is set
for some serious soul-searching on how communication
could have been used to ease the problems of millions
of stranded people.
One
commiserates with airline companies in the face of
an unprecedented airport closure. Yet when I saw the
clip of an NRI lady carrying a little baby slamming
Air India outside Delhi airport, it made me think.
The images (on NDTV) of an emotionally-charged young
woman holding a fourteen-month-old baby and saying
she was not provided with food or water and was asked
to wait for 48 hours for a flight from Delhi to Chennai
was very damaging to Air India. It is clearly a failure
of public relations and, more importantly, a failure
of human relations. Such images do irreparable harm
to the image of a service-oriented organisation.
The statement of the Minister for
Civil Aviation responding by saying that the media
was blowing these things out of proportion was an
aberration to the style of this normally media-savvy
minister.
One also wonders why relevant officials
of the airline, or airport authority were not being
shown on TV. One really does not expect a Union Minister
to be talking about water logging at airports. Here
I believe the channels were taking the easy way out
and getting sound bytes from people who are more media-friendly,
but not necessarily hands-on.
The disaster has been lived through.
The lessons need to be learned and systems need to
be put in place to ensure that proper communication
becomes an effective tool to ease the enormous pain
that unforeseen situations can throw up.
Remember, the Railways, the airlines,
the Government, the police and all these executive
arms have public relations officers and PR departments.
They need to look within and see how they could have
really helped in a situation like this.
One could take the easy way out and
ask how these worthies could have even reached out
to the media with all the water logging. Then one
might wonder how ONGC managed to get the entire media
together and present a transparent picture on another
tragedy that was playing out at the same time off
the same city. But that's another story.
