Most of these donations came in immediately after the Tsunami struck and it was very useful for helping out with the immediate and medium term relief work (and also for long term rehabilitation work).  Apart from this a large number of organizations had also raised funds from their employees and well-wishers – specifically to help in long term rehabilitation programs.  Representatives from many of these groups visited our relief centers and saw the work we were doing.  Several of these groups – Banca Sella, NEG-Micon, Minoo and his friends, WPP and Akansha, UNDP, MSDF, Scope and Citibank – have started supporting specific long term projects in these areas like alternate livelihood, constructing a school, a science lab, health van, education and health programs, etc – we will look at the specific projects in the section on long-term programs.  Other groups – Monitor, Deutsche Leasing, Temasek, Ernst and Young, Polaris and Reuters – are still considering specific proposals that they would like to support.

Most of these people told us (and very sincerely) that the Tsunami was just a starting point. They had been already thinking about ways to contribute to the poorer sections and the Tsunami gave a sudden push to their ideas – made them realize that the time to act was now. Most of these people are hoping to continue collaborating on other programs in other villages over the years.  In a way the Tsunami suddenly released a huge latent interest in poverty and development and imposed a sudden time-deadline on people. And most people responded to this time-deadline very generously.

Recently I attended a meeting at Bangalore – organized by Mr. Nandan Neelakeni of Infosys – to discuss public-private partnership in disaster management.  One of the main points that came up was to try and build in advance a structure for quickly mobilizing resources (like supplies, transport, funds, godown space, volunteers, etc) from a large number of local businesses as soon as a disaster happens anywhere – the idea was to set up an office which collects pre-commitments from people to contribute in different ways if and when a disaster happens.

In a sense, this was exactly what had happened spontaneously when the Tsunami struck (without the pre-commitments part).  Lots of different groups came forward to help us with what they could do best – either providing materials, or funds, or space or expertise or volunteers.  This coming together of people from diverse backgrounds with no prior contacts who worked with each other with such complete confidence and mutual trust was what made the whole experience so wonderful.   So many new people were working from our office, so many new volunteers were working together on the field. When I look back, I am afraid to think of how many things could have gone terribly wrong – we were really lucky that things went off so smoothly and everyone played their parts well.