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BAGH, Pakistan Oct 16, 2005 — Soldiers pulled a young girl alive from the rubble of her home Sunday, eight days after a mammoth earthquake killed tens of thousands of people and caused widespread damage in Pakistan’s mountainous north and part of India.

The cheering report came as torrential rains halted relief flights into the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which was worst hit by the quake. A general warned that the cold and wet were likely to cause more deaths among the estimated 2 million people left homeless by the disaster.

The military said rescuers found the polio-stricken girl in a wrecked house in the village of Sanger near Balakot, a town in North West Frontier Province that was flattened.

“She is absolutely fine,”

said Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, the chief army spokesman. He said he did not know her age.

Two brothers of the girl, aged 7 and 9, arrived at an army camp carrying a 7-month-old sister and seeking help for the trapped girl. They reported their parents had been killed and then led soldiers to the home, Sultan said.

“They’re the real heroes,” he said. “They said their house is destroyed, their parents are dead and nobody is alive in their locality.”

He said there was still hope, however remote, of finding survivors. The Red Cross previously said people can survive under rubble for nearly a week.

But Pakistan’s relief commissioner, Maj. Gen. Farooq Ahmed Khan, voiced fears about the chill downpours that were making conditions even more miserable for quake survivors.

“There are bound to be casualties because of bad weather. How much, I don’t know,”

Khan said at a news conference.

He said the confirmed casualty toll from the earthquake had risen to 39,422 dead and 65,038 injured. The number was expected to rise as relief teams discover more bodies in the rubble.

Khan said that 29,000 tents and 118,000 blankets had been distributed in the quake zone, but that 100,000 tents were needed. The army said medical supplies such as syringes, painkillers and antibiotics were also needed, but asked donors to stop sending fresh water because most affected areas had enough.

Pakistan has agreed to accept aid from Israel for the first time as part of an international relief effort for earthquake survivors in south Asia, a foreign ministry official confirmed on Saturday.

Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mark Regev said Israel offered the aid through direct channels with Pakistan, and will decide Sunday what teams and equipment to dispatch to the disaster zone.

Regev played down the diplomatic significance of the aid effort.

“At the moment, everyone is talking about how we can help hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis in the area of destruction,” he said. “There is a clear international effort to help Pakistan, and Israel wants to be part of
that.”.

The government offered assistance immediately after last week’s quake, which has left tens of thousands dead, but a spokesman said it only received word from Islamabad on Friday that Israeli aid would be accepted, the FT said.

Israel - which has sent rescue teams to Turkey and Mexico to assist in evacuation efforts after earthquakes struck those countries - sent its offer of aid to Pakistan through “official channels” and the United Nations, said a senior government official.

“The fact that there is a channel of communication is a sign of the times,” the FT quoted Foreign Ministry official Mark Regev as saying.

Allowing Israel to assist in the rescue efforts would be the latest sign that relations between the two countries are warming.

Israel and Pakistan - the second-largest Muslim country - have no official relations, but the two countries’ foreign ministers met last month for the first time.

Warming of Jewish-Pakistani ties
Musharraf told U.S. Jewish leaders last month that granting the Palestinians statehood would help stop Islamic terrorism and lead to full diplomatic ties between Pakistan and Israel.

Speaking to the American Jewish Congress at a groundbreaking dinner that opened with the sharing of bread and Koranic prayers, Musharraf, the guest of honor, said his Muslim country had “no direct conflict or dispute with Israel” but that Pakistanis had deep sympathy for Palestinian aspirations for a separate state.

“Israel must come to terms with geopolitical realities and allow justice to prevail for the Palestinians,” he said, describing a Palestinian settlement as the key to security for Israel and an end to Middle East terrorism.

“As the peace process progresses towards the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, we will take further steps towards normalization and cooperation, looking to full diplomatic relations,” Musharraf said to lengthy applause.

Musharraf also said he welcomed the Gaza disengagement and that he hoped Israel would soon withdraw from the West Bank as well.

Jewish leaders in New York stressed the importance of the AJC event to Jewish-Muslim relations. The event, which some 300 people attended, came after Musharraf’s September 1 meeting with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom in Turkey, the first formal high-level contact between Israel and Pakistan.

“Pervez Musharraf represents an important and large Muslim country whose influence reaches beyond the circle of Muslim states,” a prominent American Jewish official told Haaretz. “The significance of his appearance before a Jewish audience cannot be overstated.”

Contacts between the AJC and Musharraf began a few months ago, mediated by prominent personalities in Pakistan and the United States. Musharraf accepted the invitation to speak to the organization last May, when he met with AJC officials in Islamabad.

NEW DELHI, OCTOBER 8: The good news is that Saturday’s earthquake—and its eight aftershocks—isn’t the bad news scientists have long been expecting. The bad news is it’s still to come.

Four years ago, an Indo-US team had warned that

‘‘one or more great earthquakes (toll of 200,000 plus) may be overdue in a large fraction of the Himalayas.’’

Reason: Over centuries, the Indian plate—one of the 13 that make up the earth’s crust—has been moving towards the adjacent Eurasian plate at an average speed of 4 cm per year. This movement has cracked the Indian plate into several faults, slowly building up stress both in the faults and in the plate boundaries.

That stress can only be relieved through a ‘‘great quake,’’ said internationally renowned quake specialists Roger Bilham and Peter Molnar of the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA and Vinod K. Gaur, who is with the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore.

Speaking to The Sunday Express from Port Blair, where he is studying the Andaman Fault in the wake of the tsunami, Bilham said that today’s quake has ‘‘not been (strong) enough for the pent-up stress to be relieved.’’ The worst case scenario: a quake in what experts call the ‘‘Main Boundary Thrust’’—the line between the two plates—that stretches from Kashmir to the North East, right below the Himalayan range.

Today’s epicentre near Muzaffarabad in PoK is close to four major fault lines in the Indian plate. The fact that the quake was 33 km below the earth’s surface helped reduce the damage. Preliminary reports suggest that it could be in the Tarbela fault that lies in the Indus basin.

Of magnitude 7.4 recorded at 9:20 am IST, the location of the earthquake was 34.6 degree North and 73 degree East. Until late this evening, there were eight tremors, the biggest one at 16:16 which recorded 6 on the Richter scale. A study of the location of these aftershocks shows that it is in the same fault but a bit more north, reflecting the stress that has been built up as a result of the main earthquake in the morning.

The silver lining, Bilham said, was that this should be a ‘‘wake-up call’’ to both India and Pakistan that ‘‘here was a common enemy they share.’’ Extra vigilance and strict monitoring of building codes have to be enforced, he said.

This was echoed by V S Ramamurthy, Secretary, Science and Technology.

‘‘This is a timely cue to get our act together for seismic planning. Nature has been kind enough to give us a powerful reminder but thankfully the Earth has not delivered an immensely devastating blow as was being forecast.’’

Ref : Website

SOUTH Asia’s earthquake was more devastating than last year’s Indian Ocean tsunami in terms of the number of homeless and destruction to infrastructure, a UN official said today.

Hussein Gezairy, who heads the World Health Organisation’s Cairo-based regional office that covers Pakistan, said it would be “much, much more difficult” to reach quake victims in the Himalayas than the tsunami survivors.

“The devastation is much bigger than the tsunami and much bigger definitely than what happened in the United States with Katrina hurricane,”

Mr Gezairy told reporters in Islamabad.

“In the tsunami 1.5 million people were made homeless, but in this case we expect more than 2.5 million to be homeless,”

he said.

“For the 1.5 million people who were homeless something like 10 billion dollars were mobilised. I do not expect this to be happening in Pakistan, but I hope that people will give much more,”

he said.

The death toll was far higher in the tsunami. Some 217,000 people were killed when giant waves battered 11 Indian Ocean countries on December 26.

Saturday’s earthquake has killed more than 25,000 people in Pakistan and 1300 in India.

Mr Gezairy said it would be far more difficult to reach earthquake victims still cut off in the mountains.

“The tsunami was all along the coasts, no roads or bridges were destroyed and the damage was a few hundred metres inside,” he said.

“During the tsunami it was possible to have some ships and in this case only helicopters can reach the disaster areas, but they cannot transport a large number of people and equipment. It is much, much more difficult than the tsunami.”

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan (AP) - With snow falling on parts of Kashmir, the UN’s emergency relief chief said Thursday that time was running out for many hungry, homeless survivors of last Saturday’s massive earthquake and urged aid agencies to speed up efforts in remote villages.

The plea came hours after an aftershock jolted parts of Pakistan, panicking people who had survived last weekend’s devastating tremor and forcing a rescue team to suspend efforts to save a trapped woman. She died before the rescuers returned to the precarious rubble.

Jan Egeland, the United Nations undersecretary general and emergency relief co-ordinator, flew by helicopter to the hard-hit Kashmiri city of Muzaffarabad, where he said there was an urgent need to get food, medicine, shelter and blankets to millions of people. The UN estimates two million people are homeless ahead of the fierce winter in the Himalayan region.

The death toll was believed to be more than 35,000 and tens of thousands were injured. India has reported more than 1,350 deaths in the part of Kashmir that it controls.

Trucks with aid from dozens of countries choked the roads up to the crumbling towns of Kashmir, but access to some areas remained blocked because of landslides. People in many remote areas where there are no roads were still in desperate straits five days after the tremor struck.

The UN estimated some four million people were affected, including two million who lost homes, and warned that measles and other diseases could break out.

“I fear we are losing the race against the clock in the small villages” cut off by blocked roads, Egeland said. “I’ve never seen such devastation before. We are in the sixth day of operation, and every day the scale of devastation is getting wider.”

Thursday’s 5.6-magnitude aftershock was centred 135 kilometres north of Islamabad, near the epicentre of Saturday’s 7.6-magnitude quake that demolished whole towns, mostly in Kashmir and northwestern Pakistan. It shook buildings, but no significant damage in the already demolished region was reported.

“There was a lot of panic. People were scared,” said Nisar Abbasi, 36, an accountant camping on the lawn of his destroyed home in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.”Even those who were sleeping in tents came out. Everybody was crying.”

Carrying water, juice and milk, a relief team from Britain-based Plan International flew in a helicopter to villages in northern Mansehra district in North West Frontier Province and found scenes of death and desperation.

“The whole valley is smelling awfully,” said Dr. Irfan Ahmed, the aid group’s health adviser. “People were hungry and panicking. We organized them and gave charge to the people there so they could distribute according to needs.”

He said it rained and already started to snow on Wednesday, with winter just five weeks away.

“Conditions are going from bad to worse. These people don’t have any shelter. Also the school has collapsed, and the children were in those classrooms,” he said.

Ahmed said he saw one elderly survivor evacuated, along with a semiconscious three-year-old boy who was barely moving, his skin cold and clammy.

A 22-year-old woman trapped in the rubble in Muzaffarabad died Thursday after the aftershock disrupted efforts to rescue her, rescuers and witnesses said.

British, German and Turkish teams had worked until 2 a.m., trying to extract the woman after a sniffer dog detected her in the debris. But they were forced to suspend their efforts amid fears for their own safety when the aftershock shifted the building in which they were working.

When the rescuers returned after daybreak, the sniffer dog whined, indicating that it had detected the smell of a corpse. Some rescue workers wept.

“It was a very difficult decision to leave a living person and I had a responsibility to my team,”

said Steff Hopkins, a British team leader.

“It could have meant their death.”

Dozens of aftershocks have occurred since the main quake. “They will go on for months, possibly years,” said Don Blakeman, geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center.

Hope of finding survivors dwindled in Muzaffarabad, where Britain’s Department for International Development was pulling out its team of 60 search and rescue workers, said Rob Holden, the team leader for UN disaster assessment and co-ordination, which is overseeing the overall rescue effort.

“No one is giving up but it is the acceptance that the actual real chances of finding someone alive are almost nil, so we don’t need all the specialist international teams,”

Holden said, adding that 18 international teams are still in the region.

German, Afghan, Pakistani and U.S. helicopters delivered tents, blankets and medical equipment and brought back dozens of badly injured people on each return flight.

Earlier this week, the UN launched an international appeal for $272 million US for six months of emergency aid to Pakistan. Some 30 countries, including Canada, have contributed relief supplies and manpower but Egeland said he believes countries should provide more help.

“We have seen a much graver picture and I believe we need to triple the number of helicopters in the operation. My appeal to the world is to come up with more aid, more relief, and more resources,” he said.

Egeland said he thought the initial response was “not bad,” given the difficulties of blocked roads and rain.

“Tens of thousands of tents, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of emergency food, a million blankets and other relief goods are in the pipeline,”

he said.

AP National & World News

Aftershock Hits Pakistan As Aid Pours In
By SADAQAT JAN
Published: Thursday, October 13, 2005 4:51 AM CDT

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan - An aftershock jolted parts of Pakistan on Thursday, panicking hungry, homeless survivors of last weekend’s devastating earthquake and forcing rescuers to suspend efforts to save a trapped woman, who died overnight.

The 5.6-magnitude aftershock was centered 85 miles north of Islamabad, near the epicenter of Saturday’s 7.6-magnitude quake that demolished whole towns, mostly in the Himalayan region of Kashmir. The quake Thursday shook buildings, but there was no significant damage in an already demolished region.

“There was a lot of panic. People were scared. Even those who were sleeping in tents came out. Everybody was crying,”

said Nisar Abbasi, 36, an accountant camping on the lawn of his destroyed home in Muzaffarabad, a badly hit city in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

A 22-year-old woman trapped in the rubble in Muzaffarabad died Thursday after the aftershock disrupted efforts to rescue her, rescuers and witnesses said.

British, German and Turkish teams had worked until 2 a.m., trying to extract the woman after a sniffer dog detected her in the debris. But they were forced to suspend their efforts for their own safety when the aftershock shifted the building in which they were working.

When the rescuers returned after daybreak, the sniffer dog whined, indicating that it had detected the smell of a corpse. Some rescue workers wept.

“It was a very difficult decision to leave a living person and I had a responsibility to my team. It could have meant their death,”

said Steff Hopkins, a British team leader.

There have been dozens of aftershocks since the main quake, including a 6.2-magnitude temblor.

“They will go on for months, possibly years,”

said Don Blakeman, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center.

The U.N.’s emergency relief chief Jan Egeland, who flew by helicopter to Muzaffarabad on Thursday to assess relief efforts, said he fears that “we are losing the race against the clock in the small villages” cut off by blocked roads.

About a dozen men worked through the night in Islamabad looking for survivors from a 10-story apartment building that collapsed in the quake, the only serious damage in Pakistan’s capital.

On Thursday morning, they pulled out two bodies and covered them in burial shrouds. A total of 40 bodies have been recovered from the building.

Hope of finding survivors dwindled in Muzaffarabad, where Britain’s Department for International Development was pulling out its team of 60 search and rescue workers, said Rob Holden, the team leader for U.N. disaster assessment and coordination, which is overseeing the overall rescue effort.

“No one is giving up but it is the acceptance that the actual real chances of finding someone alive are almost nil, so we don’t need all the specialist international teams,”

Holden said, adding that there are still 18 international teams in the region.

A Russian team in Muzaffarabad on Wednesday rescued a 5-year-old girl who had been trapped for nearly 100 hours in the rubble.

Trucks and helicopters with aid from dozens of countries choked the roads up to the crumbling towns of Kashmir, but the hungry and the homeless in many hard-hit areas were still in desperate straits five days after the temblor struck.

The death toll was believed to be more than 35,000, and tens of thousands were injured.

“No country is ready for such a disaster,”

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said Wednesday. He acknowledged initial delays in his government’s response but said the relief operation was now in full swing.

German, Afghan, Pakistani and U.S. helicopters delivered tents, blankets and medical equipment, and brought back dozens of badly injured people on each return flight.

Eight U.S. helicopters flew 53 sorties to the affected region on Wednesday, transporting more than 1,000 people _ rescue workers in, and injured Pakistanis out, said Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara, spokesman for the U.S. base at Bagram, Afghanistan, where the helicopters are based. They also brought in 123,000 pounds of supplies and equipment, he said.

The United Nations estimated some 4 million people were affected, including 2 million who lost homes, and warned that measles and other diseases could break out.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)

Associated Press

BALAKOT, Pakistan - Inside the makeshift tent hospital in Balakot, crushed limbs hang limply from children’s bodies, badly injured people lie on cots soaked with blood and buzzing with flies, and a little girl has a gaping wound in her skull.

Quake victims arrive faster than doctors can treat them, many carried in on the backs of relatives from surrounding villages that rescue workers have not reached yet because landslides have wiped out roads.

U.S. and Pakistani helicopters worked tirelessly Thursday to bring in supplies and evacuate the wounded but could not keep up with the demand.

“The helicopters keep bringing in more supplies so the medical supplies are fairly adequate, but we need more evacuation,” said Dr. Uzer Khan. “At least we need the opening up of the roads so that doctors can take supplies to the villages that have not yet been reached and treat people there.”

Khan, 22, who just graduated from medical school in Islamabad, headed to Balakot with five friends from the university when he heard of the need for doctors here. The town, 60 miles north of the capital, was devastated by Saturday’s 7.6-magnitude earthquake. Many of the dead are children whose schools collapsed on them.

Arriving late Tuesday, they started work Wednesday at 7 a.m., helping five beleaguered Pakistani military doctors and six nurses. They worked for 14 hours straight, until they were exhausted.

Thursday morning, they started all over again.

“There’s a lot of bone fractures, limbs and ribs, and since it’s been a number of days, we’re seeing a lot of infected wounds now,” he said. “A lot of people have been coming from areas where the army hasn’t been able to reach and have been walking for days.”

Patients were being treated in tents near the Kunhar river, which divides the town. Only the worst cases were being let into the area, where about 40 to 50 people waited at any given time.

Some lay in cots in the open air, others on the ground covered with human waste and garbage.

Estimates vary wildly on how many people here died. Before the quake, Balakot’s population was about 30,000.

Col. Jean Jacques Mornat, head of a 20-man French rescue team, said there was little hope now of finding survivors.

“There are no signs of life anywhere in the collapsed buildings in Balakot,”

Mornat said on his return to Rawalpindi, a city near Islamabad.

His team arrived in Balakot the day after the quake and managed to pull five children from the rubble of a school. But he said at least 600 children had died.

Mornat said police in Balakot estimate 2,000 to 3,000 people were killed there, mostly women and children.

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan - Hungry survivors of Pakistan’s worst earthquake could not wait for relief trucks to unload crates of food and water yesterday in this pancaked city in the Kashmiri mountains. Instead, they mobbed the vehicles, shoving each other and grabbing what they could.

“We need food! We need food!”

one desperate man shouted.

U.S., Pakistani, German and Afghan helicopters today resumed aid flights suspended because of stormy weather. They brought food, medicines and other supplies to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan’s portion of divided Kashmir, and then ferried out the injured to hospitals. Some 50,000 Pakistani troops joined the relief effort.

Jan Vandemoortele, U.N. resident coordinator for Pakistan, said key roads into the quake zone that were blocked earlier have been opened up. U.S. military spokesman Col. James Yonts said that with the resumption of flights, helicopters were able to unplug any backlog of aid.

“Relief material is moving in,” Vandemoortele said in Islamabad. “It is getting there. Roads are open now.”

“The Governments of both Pakistan and India should learn with this mayhem where the authorities are even incapable to count the exact number of casualties.”

The strongest earthquake, which hit at 0350 GMT on 8th of October, is thought to have been the strongest earthquake in the South Asia region in a century. A whole generation has been wiped out in the areas devastated by the tremor. The 7.6-magnitude quake wiped away long established villages and buried victims under piles of debris. The most beautiful places on earth became the ghost towns. One of the beautiful and historical cities of the region, Muzaffarabad, 70% just flattened. Estimates of the death toll ranged between 40,000 and 60,000 and approximately 4 million people have become homeless. The horrifying graphic images on the electronic media of injured babies, women and elderly have shaken the people around the globe.

The magnitude of the earthquake was so broaden that it also affected the towns and villages in India and Afghanistan. The wounds of the Tsunami were not fully recovered yet that another natural catastrophe in region has shocked the world. International medical charity is warning that there is a danger of an epidemic of water-borne disease in the affected areas.

Relief workers and military officials close to Indo-Pak border in the Himalayan region of Kashmir struggled to reach hundreds of villages have been completely cut off. It took hours before excavators and cranes could be brought at the disaster areas. Even after 36 hours of the disaster there weren’t enough equipment to lift the debris and rescue the possible survivors. The authorities did not have the appropriate equipment to find out how many people were trapped under the rubbles. The rescue facilities and the medical relief services available in Pakistan just could not cope and the President General Pervez Musharraf had to appeal to the international community to assist Pakistan with supplies of medicine, tents, cargo helicopters and financial help to overcome the country’s worst natural calamity. The countries, around the world, without wasting any time, generously responded and delivered necessary aid packages and equipment and their teams launched the rescue operations promptly.

According to the media sources, many people have been falling sick with stomach illnesses as a result of drinking contaminated water; their health has worsened by sleeping out in the cold. They are complaining of diarrhoea, vomiting and fever. The experts are advising people not to drink the water from reservoirs, as many dead bodies may have fallen into them. It is an unmitigated debacle for Pakistan to provide immediate help and assistance to its people in their time of need rather than prompting other countries to send in aid, firemen, sniffer-dogs, even tents, blankets, medicines, doctors etc. Fortunately, the earthquake did not hit severely in the other neighbouring countries otherwise the situation could have been the same. The earthquake is a natural disaster, you cannot take any measures to stop it but at least, having proper precautionary measures, better housing and building construction planning and controls, efficient search and rescue services, disaster recovery infrastructure, medical relief and other basic facilities, the rate of losses of human lives could be reduced.

No doubt, the common people have proved to be very generous, helpful and extremely kind to each other whenever these kinds of disasters occurred. In this disaster, there has been remarkable enthusiasm, unity and discipline seen from the public. The people lined-up hours to donate the blood, deliver the aid packets and so on but the authorities did not have adequate transportation to deliver those donations to the victims in time.

Another important factor is the channelization and fair distribution of aid and funds to the victims. A country where the rate of corruption within the government agencies is terrible how one could be assured that all the foreign and local aid would be delivered to the victims truthfully.

President Musharraf replying to the media during his visit to the affected area very angrily said that the one had to show patience… even US could not act rapidly when Katrina hit New Orleans. President Musharraf’s statement may have strong weight to shut-up the media but who could deny ground realities. The real pride for any nation is having economic independency; strong management infrastructure and corruption free government structure rather than piling the atomic nuclear items.

Soviet Union was also the most powerful nuclear nation if not equal to USA then no. 2 in the world for sure. The country had nuclear arms but the people did not have money to buy bread and butter. And we all know the end result. Nation building is a step by step and stage-wise process. You cannot construct a ten-story building starting from the tenth floor to the ground level.

The conditions in India are not different than in Pakistan. The situations more or less were same when Indian State of Gujarat hit by earthquake, in 2001, where the death toll were anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000 many thousands were homeless.

India and Pakistan are the two countries which have miserably, and quite consistently, failed to provide the very basic services to their people. Both India and Pakistan keep the largest population in the world spending enormous amount of its budget on nuclear and arms development least consider in securing and equipped the country for enough rescuing measures against natural disaster and to provide the basic facilities to their people. Millions of dollars are spent on testing and building dangerous missile but least funds are allocated on providing and improving the basic necessities of the daily life.

Pakistan spends 74% of its budget on defence, India spends 25 to 30% on its arms build-up but they spend less than 10% on education and health. In every few months time Pakistan and India spend millions of dollars in testing nuclear missiles and other dangerous weapons.

According to the sources, Karachi, the largest city of Pakistan which holds 15 million people has only 3 major hospitals. In case of an emergency, only 5000 people can be provided the basic medical aid. This mega city has no matchable disaster recovery and rescue system. Only 20 fire stations exist in the entire city. God forbid if anything happens to this city one can not imagine how the authorities can cope with unforseen.

The Governments of both Pakistan and India should learn with this mayhem where the authorities are even incapable to count the exact number of casualties. These countries, instead of involving themselves, unnecessarily, in the race of piling dangerous weapons by spending millions of dollars from the government treasuries should work together in providing the basic facilities to the public. They should concentrate more to take measures for population control, providing clean water, a better environment, good health and security and to equip themselves against any natural disaster.