Ham radio to the rescue in tsunami-hit Andaman

Hindol Sengupta

Indo-Asian News Service 

Port Blair, Jan 2 (IANS) When tsunami waves broke all communication lines across India`s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, ham radio came to the rescue.

Bharati Prasad, India`s foremost amateur ham radio operator, was attempting a new transmission record here when the Dec 26 earthquake followed by the giant waves hit the archipelago.

Faced with a massive humanitarian crisis - with hundreds dying and islands with thousands of people completely out of reach - Prasad quit her project and jumped into action.

?In situations like this, the only thing that works is radio,? said Prasad, one of the 20,000 Indian ham radio operators - people who run powerful radio transmission sets connecting with fellow enthusiasts across the world.

?The phone links had disappeared, so I started using my radio set to connect with people in mainland (India) and giving information about people in Port Blair.?In fact, I was one of the first people to get in touch with a radio guy in Thailand who told me what was happening there barely minutes after the waves hit (the beach town of) Phuket.?

More than 700 people are confirmed dead and hundreds still missing in the Andamans a week after the tsunami ravaged coastlines across Asia, killing more than 120,000.

Sitting in the room in the Port Blair hotel - two cracks near the door bear ugly testimony of the quake - Prasad spoke about how the first people who used her facility were bellboys and bearers at the hotel.

?There was nothing else. There was some talk of satellite phones but that was way beyond their reach. This was free,? smiled Prasad, 46, looking like a mother who is a little harried, in her brown cotton sari and thinning black hair tied in a small bun.

?They brought me slips of paper which had the names and the phone numbers of their family members and I asked by radio contacts in Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai to make phone calls and tell them that their boy is safe,? she said.

So impressed were local administrators by her work that she has been asked to set up eight radio centres throughout the region, including remote, and worst-affected, islands like Car Nicobar and Campbell Bay.

 ?The radios are really helping us,? said Andaman police chief S. B. Deol. ?There are providing invaluable information about conditions around the islands - who needs what, where. ?Now within a day or two 15 radio operators (from the National Institute of Amateur Radio in Hyderabad) are coming here and we would be dispatching them to the remote islands. They will be our connectivity points.?

Prasad, who goes by the codename VU2RBI in the three million worldwide radio fraternity, has been an enthusiast for more than 25 years. ?I am a science graduate who got interested in ham radio because my sister and brother-in-law used to do it,? said Prasad, whose 15-year-old son is one of the world`s youngest radio operators.

?I got my licence after a couple of years and, since then, this has been the primary thing in my life. It wasn`t easy getting the licence; you have to clear electronics tests and then get home ministry security clearance. I was one of the first women in India to get a licence.?

This time, Prasad had come to Port Blair - the first person in 17 years to get permission to do radio work here - to get a record of contacting more than 35,000 people around the world through her radio set. ?We wanted to know how connected radio could be even at a (remote) place like the Andamans.?

But all that changed with the tsunami. ?Obviously disaster relief first,? said Prasad. ?In fact, I believe that the ham radio was invented to help in crises like this when nothing else works.? 

Indo-Asian News Service