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Shyam G. Menon

Mumbai , Aug. 6

SPEAK to Reliance somehow. I don't want to hear what is wrong. Tell me what you can do when everything is down."

The Sony official at Paras Complex, off Palaspa Phatta near the area Panvel, had a problem. His company had a mother warehouse at the complex, distributing nationwide its imports. The warehouse, along with half-a-dozen others belonging to major companies, got flooded on July 26 when the nearby Ghardi river overflowed due to the torrential rains.

The Sony warehouse itself was almost five feet above the ground level. "The water came in so fast; there was no time to respond. Those huts and sheds just went under water," he said, pointing to structures some 30-40 feet away. The closed shutters of the warehouse restricted water ingress to some extent, but the watermark on the wall inside was almost five feet up.

On Friday, cartons of Wega televisions lay wet and soggy inside the big warehouse. For this sort of merchandise, stacking things up on racks does not apparently work. The insurance agency's surveyor was taking stock of the damage. The Sony official declined to give any information on the value and the volume of stocks. The next step would be to hire a road roller and crush the damaged electronic items, so that none of them wound up in the market. "We have to seek permission for that because disposal has to be properly done," he said.

But Sony had already begun moving in fresh items and the official's immediate worry was creating space for the items in the warehouse. This is where Reliance came in, because the laptop used by Sony in emergencies was wired to a Reliance mobile phone and connectivity was still erratic. "Keep trying," he urged his deputy, while musing how critical it was for logistics that communication networks don't collapse. On the other side of Paras Complex, Reliance Infocomm was itself a casualty. Its warehouse too had been flooded. "This was only a small warehouse. The bigger one in Kalamboli is fine. Absolutely no water there," an official assured. "You can see that we have already cleaned everything up here."

At the nearby Nokia warehouse, an officer said, "Please talk to our corporate communications people in Delhi." Kodak's people were comparatively less restrained. "We should have lost 60-70 per cent of stocks here," one of them said. It had been a warehouse with feeds running nationwide and the place had stored everything — from photographic paper to digital cameras. "Unfortunately, our items are very sensitive to water," he said, as a group of workers packed up unopened cartons for disposal.

Elsewhere in Paras Complex, the Voltas warehouse got flooded. But it was Telcon — the Tata-Hitachi joint venture for making construction equipment — that provided an element of humour to that gloomy world of losses. Water had entered their warehouse where spare parts for distribution had been stored. However, 14 huge heavy vehicle-tyres — each costing at least Rs 25,000 in the retail market — had been kept outside the warehouse and they drifted off in the powerful current of the floodwaters.

"We managed to recover 10 of them. But four have landed in a village downstream and the villagers are demanding anything between Rs 5,000-10,000 to release them. Can you believe it? Its not even their property!" an official said.

Logistics, unlike most other sectors, captures efficiency and breakdown starkly. There were larger worries at Paras Complex. At least one official said that the Mumbai deluge could lead and may have already led to a premium on dry warehousing spaces. "Those rates, once up, won't come down," he said. For further worry, getting trucks to clear out damaged equipment was also difficult because many trucks had been stranded in the massive flood. Some were still stuck in repair.

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