IU experts discuss impact of earthquake in Pakistan
Members of a panel of IU experts Tuesday called for more international aid to help the victims of last week's devastating earthquake in Pakistan, calling it a disaster that deserved a concerted response from the campus community.\n"Perhaps we are becoming a little inured to disaster -- after a while people sort of become fatigued from giving aid," said Sumit Ganguly, director of the India Studies program at IU.\nThe panel presented its views on the military, government and international response to the devastation in India- and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir to about 25 students and professors.\nGanguly, professor Michael Hamburger and Rafia Zakaria, a graduate student from Pakistan, stressed that international aid is critical. The death toll in Pakistan was raised to an estimated 54,000 Tuesday night, with perhaps millions more injured or displaced by the Oct. 8 earthquake.\n"They need relief. Immediate relief," said Arvind Verma, chair of the panel, referring to the estimated half million people who have still not received aid 10 days after the quake.\nHamburger, a geology professor at IU, said even from thousands of miles away, geological equipment was able to pick up the earthquake. \n"Our station here in Bloomington got very high quality readings," he said.\nHe noted that readings from around the world were used to calculate the magnitude of the quake ‑ an estimated 7.6 on the Richter Scale. He added that earthquakes of this magnitude occur every four to five months, but said most of them are far enough away from population centers that they do minimal damage.\nAyesha Awan, co-president of the Pakistani Students Association and Indiana Daily Student columnist, said the group is planning to set up stations outside Ballantine Hall, the Indiana Memorial Union, the Kelley School of Business and several other campus locations to raise money for relief. The money would go to charities such as the Edhi Fund, an organization dedicated to helping the sick and needy.\nHamburger and Zakaria echoed Ganguly's concerns over the aid effort. Ganguly, also a political science professor, said the Indian military has, so far, done a good job of distributing supplies and medicine to people on the Indian side of the border, but Zakaria said that was not the case in Pakistan. She asserted that, even though the military is considered the only functioning institution in Pakistan, it has done a poor job of getting aid to rural areas. \n"(Cities) got aid right away, but the outlying areas have gotten much less," she said. \nGanguly added, as far as rural Pakistani areas are concerned, that "even under normal circumstances it is extremely difficult to access the most rudimentary forms of health care," and that, with a breakdown of basic services, there are thousands of people with not so much as a tarp over their head.\nHamburger presented a list of suggestions for reconstruction and prevention of such widespread devastation in future earthquakes, which he said are common in the area near the Himalayas because of friction between tectonic plates.\nIndia and Pakistan have been at odds since the late 1940s, and have fought over the Kashmir region in three separate wars, Ganguly said. Fortunately for victims, Indian and Pakistani officials have reluctantly cooperated in some aspects of the relief effort. \n"There has been some level of cooperation, but I fear that this is nothing more than a fleeting moment of cooperation," Ganguly said.\nThough some think there will be tension between India and Pakistan for some time, Awen said she doesn't "think the tension is so bad that people would ignore such a huge humanitarian crisis."\nAwan said that she has spoken to some members of IU's Pakistani population, and that many families of IU students are "shaken, but for the most part unhurt," but officials warn that lack of supplies and the onset of winter weather could mean thousands more dead.