Quakes may well sharpen India’s seismic readiness Premium

Indian must note that earthquakes cannot be prevented and can scarcely be predicted, but they can be prepared for

Two years ago, on February, 6, 2023, the people of Türkiye and Syria were jolted out of their sleep. At least 17,000 were killed, with their numbers mounting within minutes, as a great earthquake shook those countries in the early hours after 4 a.m., at 7.8 on a scale of 0 to 10. A second jolt came like a collaborator of the first, nine hours later, destroying whatever buildings stood on or around the scene of the first trauma.

‘Fault lines’ is an expression that we come across and use as we might ‘glaciers’ or ‘ deserts’. That is, without realising that it refers to an intensely volatile and totally unpredictable phenomenon, like the temper of the proverbial sleeping dragon or demon. Fault lines lie between the 15 log-jammed major tectonic plates on which the earth’s thin crust sits.

These lines can slumber for decades, even centuries, quietly, one may say so ‘sweetly’, that their very existence can be forgotten by all except seismologists. Until…the fault line stir, rise, shake and then go on to mutilate, destroy and kill whatever lies on and along those lines. Depending on the degree of the awakened one’s temper, the fury lasts or abates till such time as it lasts or abates.

India’s Indian Plate pressing onto the Eurasian Plate sculpted the Himalaya. The fault line involved runs right along the great Himalayan arc that stretches from Kashmir to the North East. It also implicates adjacent tracts in Pakistan, the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, Nepal and Bhutan.

We are but dimly aware of this. For those of us who do not live in those stunningly beautiful tracts, that region means and evokes snow, pure air, clear waters, holidays and leisure. But we must know, must understand, the concurrent ‘scene’ which is about potential rubble, ravaged hill sides, mutilated river courses. And trauma.

We must shake ourselves out of our dangerous illusion, our perilous innocence about the reality beneath our feet. Seismologists tell us that the two great tectonic plates, the Indian and the Eurasian, have now slept their really deep sleep long enough now and that the built-up pressure inside their folds cannot be expected to hold its tension much longer.

Sure enough, a little over just one month ago, on January 7, 2025 at 9:05 a.m., an earthquake measuring Mw 7.1 struck Shigatse city of the Tibet Autonomous Region of Southwestern China. Between 126 and 400 people were reported killed and 338 were injured. Unmindful of national borders and oblivious of lines of actual or notional control, the quake made itself felt in Nepal and in Northern India.