From the archive record
Residents stand near debris of a collapsed multi-storey building hit by a strong earthquake in Manipur. The tremor that shook the Northeastern states and West Bengal on January 4 must be treated as an urgent wake-up call. The earthquake, which had its epicentre at Tamenglong in Manipur, is the 20th such quake of magnitude 6 or higher on the Richter Scale to hit the region in the past century or so. It only re-confirms that the seismic faultlines of the eastern Himalayas are hyper-active. At least two of these earthquakes — the great Assam earthquakes of 1897 and 1950 — had crossed magnitude 8.5 and above — causing widespread devastation in the region. Scientists have been warning that the ‘return period’ of such big earthquake in the eastern Himalayas is long overdue. Harsh Gupta, former d