On Sunday morning, the met office in Pune and the Indian Meteorological Department in New Delhi released a cyclone warning relating to Gujarat and neighbouring states. However, the state secretariat sent its first serious warning to the districts only on Monday night, just 12 hours before the cyclone's estimated time of arrival. The result is there for all to see in this morning's headlines.

In Rajasthan, despite being on the periphery of the cyclone, officials were quick off the mark. It set up a corpus of Rs 2.16 crore on Sunday to meet eventualities, having heeded the warning from the Air Force base at Jodhpur as early as Saturday.

The chaos in Gujarat seems to be the result of lack of communication as much as tardy planning. Revenue secretary P K Mishra says: ``On Sunday we were told that the speed of the cyclonic winds would be 60 to 70 kmph, so accordingly we sent directives to district collectors. The renewed serious warning came only on Monday and thus the delay.''

He further contends that the Met department did not warn the administration about the wind direction. According to him the change of course warning -- from Saurashtra to Kutch -- came too late.

The Met department on the other hand says that its Delhi office had issued the right warning at the right time. The storm was always expected to hit Kutch and head towards Rajasthan.

The apathy of the top officials is evident from the fact that the chief secretary was in Delhi on Monday, despite the warning of a cyclone hitting the state the next day. He returned on the day the storm actually broke.

Sources in the state bureaucracy say the whole show was mismanaged because principal secretary to the chief minister P K Lahiri sought to convey the impression that everything was being managed from the CMO. The Revenue, Relief and Home departments had very little knowledge of the ground realities. In fact, they say, all district collectors now look to the CMO for instructions.

There is a reason for it: eight additional collector-level non-IAS officers have been posted as collectors in the districts on express orders from the CMO, which is handled by Lahiri. This has obviously divided the IAS into two groups, with one alleging that Lahiri is restricting access to Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel and even giving him wrong advice.

Lahiri says the warning had been sent out with a detailed plan of action. ``Even the positioning of the police vehicles, control rooms, hospitals had been conveyed,'' he says. Still, till late night on Wednesday the administration was unsure of the death toll and had not made alternative arrangements for communication in the districts. Few of the contact telephone numbers in Rajkot, Ahmedabad, Bhuj, Jamnagar or Porbandar worked; when they did, they could not provide accurate information. The chaos did not end in Gandhinagar, it extended to the districts. None of the officials in the affected districts appeared to have things under control. There was no evacuation plan at any of the coastal towns as is evident in the fact that fishermen had gone to the sea even on the day of cyclone.

Finally, as had been done in Rajasthan, better use could have been made of the air force base at Gandhinagar or the ISRO centre in Ahmedabad. Then, just maybe, this morning's headlines would have been different.