BHUBANESWAR, NOV 13: As putrefying bodies roast in the sun in Orissa's sea coast a fortnight after the super cyclone, a debate has been raging among political parties as to whether the catastrophe should be declared by the Centre as a `calamity of rare severity.'Every time a VVIP speaks to the press here, the newsmen demand to know whether the disaster should be declared as such, and at times, inquire why it had not been done so far. Both the Prime Minister Vajpayee and Defence Minister George Fernandes, who heads the task-force set up by the Centre four days ago to coordinate relief work and plan rehabilitation of the survivors, have called for an end to the controversy asserting that there was no separate code for national calamity.The Centre had been treating the disaster as a national calamity and funds would not be a constraint, the two leaders emphasised separately. However, senior Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee did not agree. Mukherjee, a former Union finance minister, insisted that there was aprovision for declaring a disaster as a national calamity of rare severity, a phrase coined by the Tenth Finance Commission.Fernandes said here on Friday that there was nothing called the national calamity code. Mukherjee told PTI here that in the past the Centre had declared cyclones in Andhra Pradesh, earthquakes in Latur in Maharashtra and Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh and floods in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as national calamities of rare severity. A total of Rs 1,150 crore had been spent from the National Fund for Calamity Relief (NFCR), which had a corpus of Rs 750 crore, on different occasions and different years, he said.Unfortunately, Mukherjee said the Centre had made no provision for funds in the NFCR this year.
