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"The annual toll in the Indian subcontinent, the world's most cyclone battered region, is as horrendous as the planning and mitigation are appalling."

— India Disasters Report, Oxfam, 2000

A year can be a lot of time. It can also be too little. For the Union Government, it is invariably the latter. A comprehensive disaster management plan that was dreamt up for the country after the supercyclone ravaged Orissa last October is still in its pre-birth stages. This at a time when the world is shifting its disaster-management strategy from relief work to plans for long-term preparedness and reduced disaster impact.

India is one of the world's worst-affected countries as far as natural calamities are concerned. According to the India Disasters Report, brought out by Oxfam this year, these disasters cost India US$1,884 million over the decade 1985-95. Last year's cyclone alone resulted in a loss of Rs 11,250 crore, which amounts to $2.5 billion or roughly 3 per cent of the total worldwide loss due to natural disasters.

Add to this the burden of terrible poverty, over-population, unregulated urban growth, serious malnutrition and inadequate literacy, and you have fault lines developing in a community's resilience to fight disaster.

In the aftermath of the killer storm, the Centre was quick to appoint a high-powered committee under J.C. Pant to look into disaster mismanagement in the country and find solutions. It's a year now, but the committee's final report is not yet ready.

In its interim report, the committee had pointed out that a significant role will have to be played by the community. And to create greater awareness in the community, voluntary organisations would have to step in. Those at the National Disaster Management (NDM) too agree. Says its chief Bhaskar Barua: "We are now sure that strong community participation is vital for any disaster management plan to succeed."

But is anything being done to equip the community in the face of disaster? Hardly. Committees are formed, tentative reports drawn up, but nothing concrete emerges. Says an atmospheric scientist, pleading anonymity: "The Government spends more time in closed door meetings than with affected communities."

The authorities, it seems, rarely draw lessons. When the Maharashtra Emergency Earthquake Rehabilitation Programme was designed after the Latur earthquake, it had a project outlay of Rs 11,821 million, huge by any standards, with substantial support from the World Bank. The state government had set aside Rs 510 million for a Disaster Management Plan. But
over the next few years, 70,000 families were still living in poverty out of tin sheds, fighting acute shortages in water, ration stocks and no sanitation. And all this because of gross mismanagement.

That preparedness is all cannot be denied. And the India Meteorological Department (IMD), Delhi, knows that. Some changes were brought in since last year's experience. "We felt that the managers of disaster needed more time to act," says R.R. Kelkar, IMD's director-general. So when a cyclonic
depression threatened to create a storm off Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh two weeks ago, the department had a four-stage warning system instead of the old, two-stage one.

When the Orissa cyclone struck last year, the IMD first issued an alert and then a warning. This was obviously not enough, so the MET office now kicks off the warning with a pre-cyclone watch, which precedes the cyclone alert. This means there is a storm building up at sea. It may or may not turn into a cyclone, but everyone should watch out anyway. The fourth step is a
follow-up added to the cyclone warning, which is called the post-landfall outlook. This means predicting the way the cyclone may behave once it hits land. The pre-cyclone watch gives an extra day and the final step adds value to the overall forecast: warnings about flooding and extra high windspeeds.

These are steps in the right direction but they are not enough. The cyclone-prone areas need more of the concrete platforms that serve as shelters for those running away from floods. There is also a need to build cyclone-resistant houses. Again, the plans are in place: HUDCO has envisaged cyclone-resistant units in storm-prone regions at the cost of Rs 12,000 each, but there's a long way to go.

There are many other plans like decentralised warning and evacuation systems involving a special commando force equipped with state-of-the-art technology and a nationwide computerised database and the setting up a National Disaster Management Centre, but at the moment are nothing more than good
intentions.

Scientists, working on disaster-management, have also made many suggestions. J. Srinivasan, chairman of the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, believes the real scope for strengthening lies in making administrators more data-savvy, or as a reverse technique, sending warning messages out in a more user-friendly form. For
instance, a message saying winds at 250 km per hour are about to hit a district may make less sense than a message that actually explains the kind of damage that windspeed can cause.

In a recently published paper, S.K. Dube, who heads the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at IIT Delhi, and his colleagues mooted ways to reduce disaster impact. Among them were the construction of earth dykes, concrete sea walls, replanting of mangrove forests, Orrisa has lost 8 per cent of its mangrove reserves in the past two years, and creation of storm-surge buffer zones with reed grass. By not taking these ideas seriously and implementing them in right earnest, the Government, it seems, is waiting for another disaster to happen.

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