Catastrophes unlimited

India is one of the world's major theatres of disasters - both natural and man-made catastrophes - which pound it end to end year after year. India Disasters Report, edited by PARASURAMAN S. and UNNIKRISHNAN P.V., which will be launched on February 22, presents an overview of the country's response to calamities and calls for an informed debate on the subject. Exclusive extracts from the Report are reproduced here.

Introduction

I am compelled to utter a truism in asserting that physical catastrophes have their inevitable and exclusive origin in certain combinations of physical facts.

Rabindranath Tagore

BE it an "act of God" or "act of Man", a mindboggling spectrum of disasters wreak havoc in the Indian subcontinent.

Disasters are either natural, such as floods, droughts, cyclones, and earthquakes or human-made such as riots, conflicts, refugee situations, and other like fire, epidemics, industrial accidents, and environmental fallouts. Often, the difference between them is marginal.

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The disturbing fact is that even in a region like South Asia, where poverty, deprivation, and death due to disasters are a common enough feature of life, India remains the worst-affected country. In fact, the frequency of all categories of disasters, varying from epidemics to road accidents and perennial droughts and floods, is escalating, resulting in a multifold growth of injuries, disabilities, diseases and deaths, disrupting life- supporting systems, and adding to the health, social, and economic burden of an already impoverished people.

In India, between 1988 and 1997, disasters killed 5,116 people and affected 24.79 million every year in India. In 1998, 9,846 people died and 34.11 million people were affected by disasters. Experience and study tell us that the actual figures greatly exceed the documented ones.

Classification of disasters

Definitions and categorisation of disasters vary according to geosectors, the geographical and social settings in which they are located. Every new disaster adds a dimension to human suffering. The realities that confront disaster-affected communities in developing countries often challenge conventional Western academic definitions.

In the absence of "official" definitions, observations from the field suggest that disasters be classified under three broad categories: natural, human-made, and other disasters. Amongst these, there are the major disasters and the minor disasters. It is not just the damage-destruction potential that defines a disaster as major or minor: categorisation under the former may just be a result of being comparatively well discussed and reported by the media. For a large number of people in several states of India, the distinction is academic: for them, most disasters are major and occur constantly.

Policy disasters

Yet another category, including situations such as a lack of rational policies to restrict the sale of hazardous and harmful drugs, free sale of tobacco and liquor, banned pesticides and excessive displacement of people by development projects, consists of disasters caused due to negligence on the part of the policy-makers.

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Disasters and human misery

The most important understanding that has informed this debate is that disasters occur when hazards and threats of hazards, natural and human, impact on the vulnerabilities of an area/region and its people.

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Certain groups of people are more vulnerable to a number of natural and humanmade disasters compared to others. What extends the length and intensity of their sufferings is if these vulnerable people happen to live in regions that are disasterprone.

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While natural events of devastating magnitude continue to impact differently in different parts of the world, even a cursory examination of history shows that vulnerability to disasters has always been exacerbated in the developing countries. The developing world's poor and certain ethnic groups suffer human and property loss unimaginable to the rest of the world, and their capacity to recover swiftly is limited by the very factors that caused the impact in the first place.

The 1993 Marathwada earthquake in India left over 10,000 dead and destroyed houses and other properties of 200,000 households. However, the technically much more powerful Los Angeles earthquake of 1971 (taken as a benchmark in America in any debate on the much-apprehended seismic vulnerability of California) left over 55dead.

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In the space of one month in 1997, more than 1,000 fires in parts of Southeast Asia raged through 3,00,000 to 10,00,000 hectares and caused damage estimate at U.S.$ 4.5 billion. The pall of smoke caused enormous health and safety problems in Indonesia and its neighbours, particularly Singapore and Malaysia, besides forcing the closure of airports and causing maritime accidents. In such critical and unanticipated situations, a lack of infrastructure and capacity and high vulnerabilities not only amplify the toll, in terms of both life and material; they also hamper and decelerate recovery.

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Disaster preparedness and response: holistic work

Disaster response and preparedness is most effective when it is built into development programmes. In the long run, disaster mitigation could be implemented at minimal cost by incorporating them into development programmes. The expenditure on disaster mitigation would, over time, reduce the potential losses that disasters cause.

But this is a far cry in, particularly, the poorer nations within the developing world - despite the fact that considerable advances in information and communication technologies enable rapid processing of complex data and its efficient transmission across vast distances.

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