G20 India: How ‘Himalayan’ natural disasters call for more research and consensus creation

Public’s thirst for knowledge on disaster risk reduction should be encouraged, and a consensus document on the same should find reference in the eventual G20 communiqué

Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain

At almost every social event I attend these days, the talk veers around to the disasters taking place in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. These are the ones on a large scale, the smaller ones aren’t even spoken of. Then there is the huge wildfire in Maui, Hawaii which has left over a 100 dead and over 800 missing. Indian media has not reported enough on it but Youtube is full of video clips which actually shake you to the core when you learn of people running into the ocean to escape the flames. In a bad monsoon year, if there is drought in the hills and the vegetation is dry enough to burn to cinders, many of our popular hill towns would be as vulnerable as the Hawaiian landscape and the cities within it. Few people in India are aware of the threat of forest fires and that 30 per cent of India’s districts are vulnerable to these. This year the disasters in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana mainly revolve around floods, landslides and cloudbursts, all due to excessive rainfall concentrated in localised zones in a very short period. There is much talk of the El Nino effect and that such disasters are here to stay. None of this talk is of an informed nature because the subject of disaster management is rarely a knowledge issue for the educated. Dearth of knowledge leads to conjecture, guess work and lots of misinformation. What is this knowledge I refer to?

Very few have really bothered to ascertain how the concept of management of disaster in India has changed over the years. The first and foremost point here is that the concept is no longer about awaiting a disaster and responding to it by mobilising some police and the army. From ‘response’ the system has shifted to ‘prevention, preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery’. The classic definition of disaster remains; a natural or manmade event which causes large scale damage to life and property, and cannot be handled by the local community without assistance; we need to include the loss of livelihood also within ambit of a disaster. The three events which triggered the final enactment of the Disaster Management (DM) Act of December 2005 were Odisha Super Cyclone 1999, Gujarat Earthquake 2001 and Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004; all witnessed large scale loss of life, property and livelihood. The response then was without the benefit of concept, organisation, dedicated resources, training, early warning, application of available or developed technology, and policy/doctrinal backing. Much of this was achieved by bringing about the DM Act 2005 and placing the disaster domain under the Ministry of Home Affairs. Under the Act, the raising of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) ensures a professional approach of international standards towards doctrine, policy, budgeting, technology, knowledge, guidelines, liaison and international cooperation. The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) is the key response element, very appropriately patterned to ensure the adoption of organisational effectiveness of respective units of the central police forces – CRPF, BSF, etc. Completing the triad is the National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM). It caters to the cognitive aspects relating to research, scientific and technological development, training and modelling, to reduce the impact of disasters in India.ADVERTISEMENT

The NDRF has pre-disposed forces at important hubs around India much like NSG but it can bring its specialised professional response and vast quantum of equipment expeditiously to the disaster zone only if the zone is in near vicinity; it cannot be deployed everywhere. Eventually it should have an air element as part of it – both fixed wing and rotary. The fastest response can be of the local affected community, since there will always be people who are outside the immediate disaster zone. The Government of India has instituted an innovative scheme called Aapda Mitra (Friends in Disaster) which aims at training and suitably equipping volunteers from the local community to act as first responders. In many of the Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand disaster sites these volunteers have been at the forefront of response. A move to bring back greater disaster awareness to the armed forces is also underway as their resources, both human and material, are invaluable due to their location all over the country, plus their organisational capability and inherent discipline.

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The work underway in the domain of managing disasters in India is currently under the flagship international guideline of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, outlined in 2015. The Framework recognises that the State has the primary role to reduce disaster risk but that responsibility should be shared with other stakeholders including local government, the private sector and other stakeholders. Building on this concept, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at the Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction 2016, spelt out his Ten Point Agenda for Disaster Risk Reduction. This Agenda has now become a mantra both nationally and internationally. It includes hitherto fore unspelt sub domains like gender sensitivity in disaster situations, the employment of social media, early warning and the entire gamut of knowledge management on disasters. The latter is actually an international challenge but India is now taking a lead in this. There are some leading public and private institutions with whom the NDMA works closely. Several IITs are also working on research projects and some very effective technical institutions such as the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) and the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), both at Hyderabad, are in sync with NDMA.

An early success of the government has been the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), by which mass messaging of early warning regarding some hazards such as cyclones and even lightning in specific geographical zones, can be done using mobile technology and other means of dissemination. During the recent Cyclone Biparjoy, 32 million early warning messages were generated, which combined with proactive preparedness by the Government and the achievements of the National Cyclone Risk Mitigation Programme (NCRMP), ensured zero fatalities.

The challenge in the Himalayas is landslides, glacial outbursts and many more unexpected avalanches as weather patterns change. The necessity of building a network of effective sensors. Algorithms involving mapping of physical features of slopes and water bearing capacity of the concerned soil could possibly enable assessment of early warning. A national programme to develop such technology is virtually an emergent need, as much as an AI generated earthquake warning programme. These are in the offing.You May LikeThe Best Way to Experience London’s HighlightsGo CityGet Offer  by Taboola Sponsored Links 

To mirror the NDRF States are required to have SDRF for their early response before or simultaneous with central response. Over time they must be equipped and trained to matching standards of the NDRF. Some States have already been able to do that.

The long and short of this season’s disasters is that they must instil in the public a thirst for knowledge on disaster risk reduction which is a subject discussed under a sub working group of the G20 and a consensus document of the same will hopefully find reference in the eventual G20 communique.

The writer, a former GOC of the Army’s 15 Corps. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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