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Policy
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B&E
The Future of India?
What is more painful than the disasters that destroy everything is the lack of proper management to handle the aftermath. What can bring hope is in itself hopeless and raises real alarm bells, say ratan lal bhagat & niharika patra
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 Is it the beginning of the end of the world? Cynics, astrologers and self-proclaimed experts claim that the year 2012 would be the catastrophic year for mankind as the world would cease to exist. Hard to believe, right? Even Nostradamus, the man who saw tomorrow, wasn’t totally correct, thus no one knows what future has in store for us. But the past and the present happenings can definitely give inklings to the ultimate bearing. And with the world being fiercely struck and wrecked by continuous and increasingly frequent bout of disasters, both natural and man made, the fatal omen is more likely to be true. Well, as humans and more precisely individuals, it is not in our hands what the Almighty has decided for us. But we can surely do one thing, to prepare ourselves for the unknown and try and minimise the loss that comes with each disaster.
But in the list of all the uncertainties, one thing is getting more and more
certain with every calamity that strikes. That India is going to be the epicenter of the downfall, if and when it strikes. Yes, the natural reasons are there but what makes India more prone is the lack of
an efficient Disaster Management System. Whenever any thing happens, whether natural or man made, Indian system falls like a pack of cards costing billions in most of the cases. It is estimated that since 2000, India has suffered an economic loss of $18 billion because of 10 disasters.
Modern India has been battered and bruised by the world’s most severe droughts, famine, cyclones, earthquakes, chemical disasters, mid-air head-on air collisions, rail and road accidents, not to forget that it has been cornered from all directions with cross border terrorism. And what makes India more susceptible to risks is it’s geography. As per many geographic surveys; nearly 60% of the entire Indian landscape is susceptible to seismic damage in varying degrees. The scenario looks all the more grim when one takes into account the average area affected by floods every year. On an average about 8 million hectares of landscape is destroyed by flood. And of the nearly 7,500 kilometers long coastline, approximately 5,700 kilometers is vulnerable to cyclones while 68% of India is at risk of drought.
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 The excessive misusage of natural resources and the mounting burden that have destroyed the ecological balance have made natural calamities inevitable. But timely preparedness and preventive approach for both natural and man made disasters can definitely mitigate the damage to manageable limits.
Not that India does not have a system. The successive governments and policy makers did formulate many bodies to look after disaster management. From the enactment of Disaster Management Act, 2005 to setting up the National Disaster Management Authority to coming up with the National Institutes of Disaster Management (NIDM) along with various states’ Disaster Management Cells. But these so called saviours at the time of distress have proven to be more of paper puppets than anything else. Whether it was the Bengal famine, Orissa Super Cyclone, Latur earthquake, Bhopal gas tragedy, Andhra cyclone, Bhuj earthquake, tsunami or the recurring floods in Bihar (Koshi in 2008), terrorists attacks in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore or the most recent spread of the epidemic swine flu virus and the current havoc causing floods down south, India has always been found wanting and under-prepared. The quality of Indian infrastructure has also proved to be a big hurdle. The loss of NH-7 to flood waters is a shame and the same can happen again unless the quality of assets in India improves.
“We are prepared to tackle any situation but when there is a huge deviation from the expected occurrence all the planning goes for a toss. For example the floods in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka had deviated more than 600% thus one can do very little in such disasters,” defends Dr. Santosh Kumar, Professor at NIDM. The fact also remains that while the media has shown disaster in a crude manner, what has occured post any such kind of unsuspected happenings have never made headlines but have been poorly and shabbily covered, just for the sake of doing so.
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