Managing disasters is no child's play

The entire North-eastern region is currently reeling under a spell of serious natural disaster. Heavy incessant rains, floods, landslides, and disruption of road and railway communications have crippled all the seven states of the region. In Assam alone, 71 persons have lost their lives till Sunday evening. Exact figures for the loss of farm and domestic animals, granaries, standing crops, houses and government infrastructures like roads, bridges and buildings are not immediately available. The situation in Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura are also moving from bad to worse every passing day. One question many people are asking is: What was the disaster management plan the respective governments and their specific agencies had in hand to handle such a situation? Logging in to the Assam State Disaster Management Authority website, one cannot find any disaster management plan, be it overall for the state, or each of the vulnerable districts. As far as the flood is concerned, Assam State Disaster Management Authority on its 'Hazard and Vulnerability Profile' page has a four-sentence statement on floods which looks more like a small essay written by a middle school student. The same is the case with the paragraphs on landslides, erosion, earthquakes and extreme winds. When it comes to tackling the flood situation in Guwahati, one fails to find any worthwhile disaster management plan on the websites of the Guwahati Development Department, Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority, Guwahati Municipal Corporation and Kamrup (M) district administration. Taking a closer look, one will find that the news media – both print and electronic – have been regularly reporting about the condition of the city's drainage channels and the increasing vulnerability in the city's hills almost round the year, be it in the monsoon season or the dry season. One example is enough to understand that the authorities do not have any disaster management plan in hand. Hundreds of people in various localities of Guwahati could not go to their respective workplaces during the past week because the localities were underwater. Several hundred, if not several thousand, who are particularly employed in the private sector, were fleeced by cycle rickshaws which charged anywhere from Rs 100 to Rs 500 for transporting a person even for a 200-metre stretch. Most daily wagers including domestic workers missed work because they could not afford to pay such high amounts to rickshaw pullers. The authorities could not even provide a few cycle rickshaws or inflated rubber boats on the roads which had become rivers for such people.