Can India tackle its next disaster?

For Mumbai resident Lavanya Anand, July 26, 2005 is a day she can never forget. It was a day before her birthday and she was stranded in the streets of Mumbai, thanks to a cloudburst that had brought the city to its knees. She had left office at 4 pm, half an hour before the rain intensified. “I was on the darkened streets with others wading like my friends and I were,” she said.

Anand and her friends spent the night with a Bandra (East) couple who, like many others, opened up their home to stranded strangers. Anand left the next morning at 7 am, wading about 25 kilometres through floodwaters to Versova. “In all, it took me 18 hours to get to my Versova home from Lower Parel,” she recalls, lauding the effort made by the people of Mumbai, the police and the armed personnel. 

Others were not so lucky. With city and state agencies having no experience in handling a calamity of such proportions, at least 1,094 lost their lives, while the economic impact was estimated at about Rs 550 crore. 

That’s not all. According to a report by the Home Ministry, 60 per cent of the landmass in India is prone to earthquakes, over four crore hectares are susceptible to floods, about 8 per cent overall likely to be hit by cyclones and 68 per cent prone to drought. “In the decade 1990-2000, an average of about 4,344 people lost their lives and about 30 million people were affected by disasters,” it said.

Since 2000, the Indian subcontinent has witnessed several natural disasters. These include the 2001 earthquake that hit Bhuj in Gujarat, the 2004 tsunami, the 2005 deluge in Mumbai , the 2005 Kashmir  earthquake, the 2007 floods in Bihar, the 2013 Uttarakhand flash floods, the 2013 Jammu & Kashmir floods, and the 2014 Nepal earthquake and the 2015 Chennai floods.

According to the National Disaster Management Plan, 2016, published by the National Disaster Management Authority, the approach towards post-disaster restoration and rehabilitation has shifted to one of better reconstruction. 

“While disasters result in considerable disruption of normal life, enormous suffering, loss of lives and property, global efforts consider the recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction phase as an opportunity to build back better integrating disaster risk reduction into development measures, and making communities resilient to disasters,” the report says.

Interestingly, this is the first such report that has been released by the union government despite the country’s susceptibility to natural disasters. According to Dr Anshu Sharma, co-founder and mentor at SEEDS, a New Delhi-based NGO, the disaster management cell was a part of the Ministry of Agriculture before it moved to the Ministry of Home Affairs. 

“Since the time the British ruled India, famine was a problem that plagued farmers and it was understandable that disaster management fell under the arm of the Ministry of Agriculture. However, over a period of time, it moved into the ambit of the Ministry of Home Affairs, even though India needs to have a separate ministry that tackles disaster management,” he said.

The series of disasters, though, seems to have its effect  – India is hosting the seventh Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction from November 2-5 in New Delhi that seeks to enhance international sharing of best practices in disaster management, the second time it is doing so.

Traditional versus modern technology

According to a report made available by the Uttarakhand government in May 2014, 169 people were declared dead and 4,021 people were reported missing (presumed to be dead). About 4,200 villages were affected, 11,091 livestock were lost and 2,513 houses were completely damaged.

While speaking to DNA, Dr Sharma made an interesting observation. He, along with his team were a part of the rescue operations in Uttarakhand and from his observations, most of the buildings that were damaged or destroyed were those that were built in the past 25 years. “Buildings that are over 100 years old still stand in Uttarakhand, but the newer constructions that are ‘unengineered’ are the ones that have faced maximum damage,” he said

Dr Sharma attributes this to the fact that the steel and cement industry had penetrated the Indian market and while India has produced excellent architects, skilled labourers cannot read building plans and better equipped in handling traditional building materials compared to steel and cement. “We’re losing traditional building knowledge and still need to be clued into it,” he said.

India versus the rest

While talking about disaster management in India, Dr Sharma says it is unfair to compare India’s disaster managing skills with other, developed countries because of the ways each country deals with disaster. “In India, we need to look at the way each state handles a disaster and there are of course some that deal better than others. This is because they have been through a disaster and learned from it, rather than learning from another state,” he added.

Currently, according to Dr Sharma, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand are best equipped to handle a disaster compared to other states.

In 2011, Japan suffered an earthquake, which was followed by a nuclear reactor accident at Fukushima. Japan’s National Police Agency said that 45,700 buildings were destroyed and 1,44,300 were damaged by the quake and tsunami. The damaged buildings included 29,500 structures in Miyagi, 12,500 in Iwate, and 2,400 in Fukushima. The aftermath of the twin disasters also left Japan’s coastal cities and towns with nearly 25 million tonnes of debris. In Ishinomaki alone, there were 17 trash collection sites 180 metres long and at least 4.5 metres high. 

An independent parliamentary panel was critical of the Japanese government’s preparedness to the earthquake and its aftermath. “The profoundly man-made disaster was the the result of poor earthquake-safety planning and faulty post-tsunami communication,” the report said.

Dr Sharma points out that the fundamental difference between countries such as Japan and India is the fact that while the Japanese are trained at an elementary level to be mentally prepared in case of a disaster, they do not do anything unless given instructions. “Indians, on the other hand, start digging into the rubble in case they know that someone is buried inside. We tend to help the authorities and as a result, don’t end up with post-disaster trauma,” he said, adding that a team of government officials and disaster management experts from Japan had come to India in 2001 to study how the Gujarat government, along with the armed personnel and central government, managed the aftermath of the Bhuj earthquake.

Dr S. Mohammed Irshad, an Assistant Professor at Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, added that the main reason why India’s response time to disasters is high is because of the local help. 

“During the time of the tsunami, the local fishermen were the first to react to the disaster and ensure people were rescued. Since the locals know the area better, it only makes sense that they start carrying out rescue work before official help arrives,” he said.

Dr Irshad added that while in theory, India is well-equipped to manage a disaster, there are several factors that need to be addressed before once can affirm the same theory in practice. Citing an example of the Assam floods earlier this year, he said, citing his research that no government body had reached the interiors of the state. 

“While some local governments are equipped to tackle a disaster, it can’t be said about all local governments. Even when you look at an urban landscape, while Mumbai may be ready to tackle a disaster, Mumbra, which is on the outskirts of the city, faces problems because of the number of illegal structures that can collapse at any time,” he said.

When asked whether local intervention would hamper disaster rescue operations, Dr Irshad replied in the negative, explaining that although not trained, locals may know the area better than rescue teams that come from other parts of the country. “There are tribes in Assam who train local governments how to tackle a disaster because they know the terrain better than others,” he said.

Early training 

Dr Sharma says that India still has room to improve the way disaster management is taught in schools. “Currently, it’s a theoretical subject taught in CBSE schools, but needs to be more hands-on. In Japan, it’s the other way and children in elementary schools are taught how to react to a situation and not freeze because of the shock,” he points out. 

When we asked him on prevention better than cure and focusing on disaster solutions instead of management, Dr Sharma said that Japan is much smaller than India and following a solution model works better, given the topography of the country is similar. “In India, however, we have so much diversity, which makes it difficult right now to form a disaster solution cell,” he said.

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Challenges ahead 

The biggest problem India faces when it comes to the predictive scenario is the lack of data. According to Dr Sharma, no government body so far has managed to collect any data when it comes to disasters in India. “Because of this, it become difficult to understand how to deal with a situation without actually experiencing it,” he said. 

According to him, India loses one per cent of homes annually because of natural disasters. “That’s technically 2 million homes lost every year, which is a phenomenal number,” he says.

As for reactive action, every state that has a disaster management cell has sufficient funds to tackle a calamity, say experts. The problem, they say, is the lack of human resources and infrastructure. “Again, the problem is the lack of data and we need to create a body that tabulates every natural disaster recorded in the country, the losses and the learnings from it,” said Dr Sharma.

 Dr Sharma believes that we’re doing the right things. “I see a positive shift in the next 5-7 years regarding India’s disaster management skills,” he says.